Learning in govt schools back to pre-Covid levels
The ASER 2024 report shows improved reading levels in government schools post-Covid, aided by the NIPUN Bharat initiative, though private schools lag behind.
The long shadow cast by the Covid-19 pandemic on educational outcomes may have lifted according to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024 report released Tuesday, with the hand of a government scheme to improve foundational learning and numeracy (FLN) being clearly visible.
According to the report, released by the Pratham Foundation , reading levels among government school students in Class III and V have improved compared to pre-pandemic levels, as measured in the 2018 edition of the report. Those of private school students are better than they were in 2022 (when the impact of the pandemic was still being sharply felt), but still lower than pre-pandemic levels, perhaps because they did not have a targetted initiative like government schools did with the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN) Bharat programme. To be sure, private school students still did better than their government school peers.
According to the report, the reading levels among government school students improved in 2024 with 23.4% of students in Class III and 44.8% in Class V students being able to read a Class II text; the corresponding pre-pandemic levels recorded in 2018 were 20.9% and 44.2%, respectively. In 2022, these were 16.3% and 38.5%. To be sure, despite the improvement , 76.6% of Class III government school students and 55.2% of Class V government schools students are still unable to read Class II text.
The reading levels among private school students were lower in 2024 compared to 2018. Only 35.5% of Class III students and 59.3% of Class V students had basic reading skills in 2024 compared to 40.6% and 65.1% respectively in 2018. The corresponding numbers in 2022 were 33.1% and 56.8% in 2022.
States that showed a 10 percentage points and higher increase compared to 2022 are Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Odisha, Maharashtra, and Mizoram for Class III students and Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Sikkim, and Mizoram for Class V students.
The Union government’s NIPUN Bharat programme, aimed at ensuring all children in India are proficient in reading and numeracy by the end of Class III by 2026-2027 may be responsible for the gains.
HT reached out to education ministry officials for a response but did not get one immediately.
“Many state governments have run training programmes for teachers and equipped them with teaching materials to improve learning under NIPUN Bharat programme. During Covid-19, parents started taking interest in their student’s studies. The combination of government policies and parents efforts led to an improvement in learning skills,” said Rukmini Banerji, CEO of Pratham Education Foundation .
NIPUN was launched on July 5, 2021.
Pratham has been publishing ASER reports since 2005. In 2016, it introduced its ‘basic’ and ‘beyond basic’ reports. Those were published every alternating year. The last basic report was published before the pre-pandemic period in 2018. With school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, the basic report for 2022 was released after four years. The latest ASER 2024 basic report is an outcome of a nationwide rural household survey conducted among 6,49,491 children in 17,997 villages across 605 rural districts in India.
The proportion of Class III students able to do at least a numerical subtraction problem dropped from 28.2% in 2018 to 25.9% in 2022, but increased to 33.7% in 2024. Among government school students, this figure dropped from 20.9% in 2018 to 20.2% in 2022 but increased to 27.6% in 2024. For private school students, the corresponding numbers were 43.5% in 2018, 43.1% in 2022 and 47.5% in 2024. “Government schools across most states have shown gains since 2022, with over 15 percentage point increases recorded in states like Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh,” the report said.
Uttar Pradesh recorded 11.5 percentage point improvement in Class III reading levels in government schools, according to the report. Share of students who were able to read Class II- level text in Class III increased from 16.4% in 2022 to 27.9% in 2024
The proportion of Class V students who can at least do a numerical division problem has also improved from 27.9% in 2018 to 30.7% in 2024. It was 25.6% in 2022. The corresponding numbers for government school students were 22.7% in 2018 and 26.5% in 2024. In private schools, this proportion increased from 39.8% in 2018 to 41.8% in 2024.
“The learning level deteriorates if students are not being equipped with age-appropriate learning. Government should fill school vacancies to improve learning levels of students,” said Pradeep Kumar Choudhury, faculty at Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.
For the first time, ASER reported a section on digital literacy and found that almost 90% of both girls and boys between 14 and 16 years of age have a smartphone at home. A total of 82.2% of all children know how to use a smartphone including 85.5% and 79.4% of girls.