School education recovers from losses post-pandemic: Report

School education has either recovered from the Covid pandemic losses or is on its way to doing so. This is the key takeaway from the 14th Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) released by the Pratham Foundation, a non-governmental organization, on Jan 28.

While part of the recovery can be attributed to students going back to school regularly after missing classes during the pandemic, part can also be attributed to the New Education Policy’s (NEP) focus on improving foundational skills or what ASER tracks as learning outcomes. To be sure, the recovery remains uneven across states and enrolment levels.

The 14th ASER report is based on a 2024 survey conducted in 17,997 villages across 605 rural districts. It reached 649,491 children in the 3-16 years age group and tested the reading and arithmetic skills of over 500,000 children in the 5-16 years age group. ASER reports are considered the most credible source of information on learning outcomes among school students in rural India.

The findings of this report are significant because it is only the second such report after the Covid-19 pandemic, the last one being in 2022. The report is released every two years but the 2020 survey could not be conducted because of the pandemic, which makes 2018 the pre-pandemic benchmark for learning outcomes.

The share of children (the report gives data for students in standard III, V, and VIII) who could read a standard II level text or subtract and divide had fallen between 2018 and 2022, underlining a loss of learning outcomes because of the pandemic’s disruption.

This share was either back to 2018 levels or shows improvement compared to 2022 levels across the board. The improvement in arithmetic abilities is better than that in reading skills. Interestingly, the improvement was faster in government schools than private schools, although the former still lagged the latter in absolute terms.

Why have government schools improved faster than private ones? The report says that this may be the result of the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN) Bharat Mission, launched in 2021 after the NEP 2020 laid focus on foundational skills.

“We have not seen improvements of this magnitude in the last 20 years since ASER has been presenting data on foundational reading and arithmetic. Everything seems to point towards NEP 2020 and its focus on foundational skills,” the report quotes ASER Centre Director Wilima Wadhwa as saying.

Over 80% government schools surveyed

Data collected in the 2024 ASER supports some of the report’s arguments. Over 80% of government schools surveyed received a directive from the government to implement FLN (foundational literacy and numeracy) activities. Similarly, at least one teacher in at least 75% of these schools received training in FLN and a similar proportion of schools received some teaching learning material for FLN. A qualitative survey conducted in 24 classrooms across eight states, similarly, found teachers at least recognizing the importance of FLN.

The improvement notwithstanding, learning outcomes still continue to be poor. Also, there are wide differences across states in terms of not just learning outcomes but also improvement from pre-pandemic levels. In standard III, reading ability in more than half the states (15 of the 27 states; Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh were clubbed together and counted as a state for comparison with the numbers before its bifurcation in 2019) was behind 2018 levels in 2024, although arithmetic ability had improved for all but six states. In standard V and VIII, at least half the states did not return to pre-pandemic skills even in arithmetic. However, the relatively wider improvement in standard III implies that some of its credit can go to NIPUN Bharat Mission. The scheme only targets classes up to standard III.

The ASER report also gives a suggestion that income levels have recovered in rural areas from the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. This seems to be the case from a rise in private school enrolment levels compared to 2022 and a fall in share of students in government schools. The pandemic’s hit to parents’ incomes had forced a lot of poor people to shift their children from private to government schools to save on paying fees.

Enrolment, which did not decrease in 2022, was stable at that level in 2024. The proportion of the 6-14 years age group – the age group covered by the Right to Education Act of 2009 – out of school in 2024 was 1.9%, only a marginal increase from the 1.6% figure in 2022, and lower than the 2.8% figure in 2018 (the last ASER before the pandemic).