Last year’s Economic Survey pointed out that the gap between class standards and learning levels has widened since the pandemic
Editorial
Jan 29, 2025 07:20 IST First published on: Jan 29, 2025 at 07:20 IST
During the Covid-19 pandemic, India had one of the longest school closures in the world. Digital learning locked vast numbers of underprivileged schoolchildren out of the classroom and online classes struggled to replace the experience and quality of teaching in a physical classroom. Last year’s Economic Survey pointed out that the gap between class standards and learning levels has widened since the pandemic. It noted that “improving learning outcomes and undoing the Covid-induced learning loss is more urgent than ever”. The survey, however, struck a note of optimism: “The education sector is bustling with the across-the-board transformation led by the NEP 2020, which is expected to yield foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) skills for every child passing the third standard in the near future.”
The latest ASER report, released on Tuesday, shows that this optimism was not misplaced. It shows that classrooms have not only recovered from the disruption caused by the public health emergency, in several respects, the foundational skills of primary and secondary-level school children today is much better than even that of their counterparts in the year just before the pandemic.
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What is even more heartening is that government schools are at the forefront of this recovery. A large chunk of the credit, as the ASER report points out, should go to the New Education Policy’s thrust on improving foundational learning skills. It notes that though states have adapted the NEP’s prescriptions in different ways, all of them have adopted the policy’s teacher-centric approach. The large-scale rollout of teacher training programmes on foundational skills shows a national commitment towards addressing a longstanding deficit. The training is slowly leaving a mark on the ways teachers relate to students in classrooms.
The ASER surveyors found that many teachers are now empathetic to the specific needs of students in the early years of school. However, as ASER 2024 indicates, educating educators is still a work in progress. There cannot be a fixed pedagogical template to teach children in all schools even if they are in the same grade — a fact underlined by the NEP as well. Today, teachers seem to have limited opportunities to address classroom-specific challenges. The ASER report, therefore, underlines the importance of post-training support to teachers. Crucially, decisions on what and how to teach are still based primarily on syllabus completion.
“Resolving the inherent contradiction between ensuring universal FLN and syllabus completion is a question that the system has yet to reckon with in a systematic way,” the ASER report points out.
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Today, more than 100 million children are in the foundational learning stage. When these youngsters graduate from school, the country would be at a critical stage in releasing its demographic dividend — that window would then be open for at most another decade and a half. Therefore, while policymakers can justifiably be upbeat about the good news from the ASER survey, they would be mistaken in not reading the report in its entirety. They must give particular attention to the passages that underline the tasks ahead. The future’s at stake.
