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In 2024, Belong To published what it described as landmark national research on LGBTQ+ inclusivity in primary schools. The findings of the Belong To Primary study – co-led by University of Limerick academic Dr Aoife Neary – have been swiftly absorbed into policy discussions at the highest levels, and the research was positioned from the outset to have a significant impact on both classroom practice and the broader field of gender and sexuality education.
Wanting to ensure that all children feel welcomed and safe in schools is, of course, a good thing. Good intentions, however, do not guarantee good research. And when it appears that statistics are being misused to advance a predetermined agenda rather than to honestly report what the evidence shows, serious questions need to be asked.
The findings of this study have already had an impact on the redeveloped Primary Wellbeing Curriculum and have been used as the basis for the development of Belong To’s LGBTQ+ Inclusive Primary Schools Pilot Programme currently being piloted in twelve schools. Most recently, this research was cited in Ireland’s Universal Periodic Review submission to the United Nations Human Rights Council by a coalition of 23 LGBTQ+ organisations, including TENI and Belong To.
It is clear that the Belong To Primary study is not minor or peripheral. It has become the springboard from which many other things are to be launched. The study is explicitly and intentionally structured around the Department of Education’s Wellbeing Policy Statement and Framework for Practice. An ESRI narrative review, commissioned to inform the updated Wellbeing Policy for 2026-2030, positions LGBTQ+ inclusivity as a precondition for promoting wellbeing in schools. The recommendations that arise from the Belong To Primary study slot directly into this.
Given the reach and influence of this research, its conclusions and the evidence underpinning them deserve to be scrutinised. Basing policy on research is obviously fine, provided the research measures up. This research does not.
Claims of representativeness are made that the sample does not permit, conclusions are drawn that the methodology does not support, and the headlines consistently outrun the data.
We can begin with the most basic question any survey must answer: who responded, and do they reflect the population the research claims to describe? In this case, the population is the broader primary school workforce. If the people who chose to participate differ significantly from this in ways that matter – their identity, their beliefs, the type of school they work in – then the findings describe only those respondents and cannot be used to draw conclusions about primary school staff as a whole. As we will see, the differences here are not marginal.
Around 15 percent of respondents to the Belong To survey identified as LGBTQ+, against a general population estimate of 4 to 6 percent of Irish adults.
Staff from multi-denominational schools – mostly Educate Together – made up roughly 27 percent of the sample, despite multi-denominational schools accounting for only about 5 percent of primary schools. Staff from Catholic schools – which make up 88.5 percent of the primary sector – represent just 59 percent of respondents.
On religion, 53.5 percent of respondents identified as Roman Catholic, against 69 percent of the wider population in the 2022 Census, while roughly 25 percent were atheist or agnostic, nearly double the proportion nationally.
This means that the study’s respondents are substantially more secular, more LGBTQ+ identified, and more concentrated in non-denominational schools than the actual Irish primary school workforce – and this is before we consider that the survey was entirely voluntary. This skew is exactly what you would expect from a self-selecting sample on a topic where people tend to hold strong views.
When a survey circulated under the banner of LGBTQ+ inclusivity lands in a teacher’s inbox, who is likely to click the link? Probably not the teacher whose priorities lie elsewhere, or the one who feels that their school’s religious ethos already provides a framework for inclusion and pastoral care. The teachers who felt compelled to respond are most likely those who are already enthusiastic about LGBTQ+ inclusivity and who want to see more of it in schools. A survey of people who already care intensely about a topic will, almost by definition, overstate the prevalence of those views in the wider population. Any claims that the findings do anything more than describe the particular group of people who chose to respond should be treated with considerable scepticism.
Oddly, 23.4 percent of respondents indicated that they do not teach or work in a class. Of course, all staff who have contact with children should treat them with respect and care regardless of whether they identify as LGBTQ+, but the responses of non-teaching staff were included in questions that specifically related to teaching and classroom practices. The Key Findings Report highlights that 1 in 4 do not feel confident in knowing how to plan LGBTQ+ inclusive lessons or in teaching LGBTQ+ inclusive SPHE/RSE. With no “not applicable” option available for these questions, what were non-teaching staff supposed to select except not confident? The proportion reporting low confidence is very nearly identical to the proportion of respondents with no classroom role, rendering the figure unreliable as a measure of teacher confidence.
The central narrative in the public-facing material is that teacher confidence is key. The reports and promotional video all argue that the main barrier to LGBTQ+ inclusive practice is not willingness – teachers want to be inclusive – but confidence. The solution, naturally, is training.
There’s a serious problem with this willingness-confidence-practice framing. “Willingness” is never actually measured in the survey. There’s no direct question asking teachers whether they want to include LGBTQ+ content in their classes.
Instead, the report infers willingness from general attitude questions and then concludes that since attitudes are generally positive, but practice is limited, confidence must be the missing piece. This assumption is presented as a finding.
Crucially, the study presents only descriptive statistics – counts and percentages – and runs no statistical analyses whatsoever. It does not control for the many other factors that could just as plausibly explain why teachers may or may not include LGBTQ+ content in lessons: school type, class level, curriculum constraints, or whether the teacher identifies as LGBTQ+.
Without that kind of analysis, the data cannot support the claim that confidence is the key barrier. That is a narrative the researchers chose to impose on them.
It’s worth pausing on what this narrative achieves. By asserting that the issue is that teachers lack confidence, the study creates a convenient gap that can only be filled with the specific kind of LGBTQ+ inclusive professional development that Belong To provides.
The organisation partnered on the research, co-designed the survey, and now stands as the recommended solution to the exact problem the research identified. In any other context, commissioning a study that concludes there is widespread demand for the product you sell, using a methodology that virtually guarantees that conclusion, would be recognised as market manipulation. Instead, this research is being treated as an evidence base for significant sector-wide changes.
The headline figures also deserve close inspection. Public-facing materials emphasise that 85 percent of respondents support including LGBTQ+ characters in lessons – a figure that sounds like an overwhelming consensus.
Yet the figure glosses over the fact that nearly 15 percent would limit this to older classes and 11.5 percent say no class group should include such content at all. Support for including “same-gender parented families” in lessons was reported in a similar manner. The report leads with the largest possible figure, constructed by combining meaningfully different responses. Readers of the summary materials would have no idea that teachers hold genuinely different views about what is appropriate to teach and when.
The ethos question is also poorly constructed. Respondents were asked a yes-or-no question: do you think your school’s ethos impacts upon LGBTQ+ inclusivity? Around 2 in 5 said yes. This type of question cannot distinguish between a positive or negative impact. The study’s own authors acknowledge that the comments providing more detail were mixed – some respondents felt their school’s ethos was supportive, while others felt it created constraints.
Yet the Key Findings Report prominently and singularly quotes a respondent who is critical of Catholic school ethos to illustrate the point that ethos is a barrier. This cannot be seen as a neutral presentation of the findings, particularly given a previous Belong To report suggested the removal of religious influence from schools and Dr Neary’s published works have consistently framed Catholic ethos as a systemic barrier to LGBTQ+ inclusion.
To be clear about what this critique is and is not. It is not an argument against LGBTQ+ young people being treated with dignity and care in schools. That is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether this study, shaped from the outset by an organisation with a direct interest in its conclusions, based on a voluntary survey that over-represents the groups most sympathetic to those conclusions, should be given such disproportionate influence in shaping policy and practice across all primary schools in the country.
For several years now, parents of primary children have been raising legitimate concerns about the embedding of gender ideology and age-inappropriate content into their children’s education. They have been disregarded and their concerns have been mischaracterised. Meanwhile, a solution to the obstacle of parental primacy was being constructed.
By framing LGBTQ+ inclusion as a matter of student wellbeing – and wellbeing is a statutory obligation on all schools – the question of whether parents consent, or whether a school’s ethos permits it, becomes secondary. LGBTQ+ inclusive practices, as defined by Belong To, are repositioned as a necessary component of a school’s duty of care.
Belong To’s pilot programme is already running in schools. At no stage does anyone appear to have thought it necessary to first establish whether the underlying research actually supports the conclusions being drawn from it.
The wheels were set in motion before the evidence was examined. We should all be asking how we hit the emergency brake and take time to consider what real evidence-based education policy looks like.
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