Module on Child Functioning – Teacher Version
Good-quality data are key to eliminating discrimination based on disability and to accelerating global progress towards inclusive policies and programmes, including in education.
The Child Functioning Module (CFM) , released by UNICEF and the Washington Group on Disability Statistics in 2016, has been used in several countries to generate estimates on the number and proportion of children with functional difficulties. The questions are designed to be administered as part of household surveys to mothers or primary caregivers and ask about the difficulties their child(ren) may have in certain functional domains. Difficulties are assessed according to a range of severity (that is, no difficulty, some difficult, a lot of difficulty, cannot do at all).
Following the release of the CFM for household surveys, UNICEF and the Washington Group developed a Teacher Version of the Child Functioning Module (CFM-TV) that can be used in national Education Management Information Systems as well as other data collection efforts, such as school-based surveys, with teachers as respondents. With the necessary caveats, the CFM-TV can also be used for programme monitoring and evaluation. The CFM-TV was developed to take advantage of school-based data collections. Such collections, either as part of Education Management Information Systems or surveys, have the benefit of reduced costs compared with other data collection platforms, such as household surveys, since data collection occurs where children are known to be present.
The CFM-TV consists of 20 questions for school-aged children (5 to 17 years). The questionnaire is designed to identify difficulties in a number of functional domains — seeing, hearing, mobility, fine motor, communication/comprehension, learning, remembering, attention and concentrating, coping with change, controlling behaviour, relationships, and affect (anxiety and depression).
