There’s a lot to be happy, and hopeful, about the latest ASER or Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) that has since 2005 measured Indian schoolchildren’s ability in reading, writing and arithmetic.
Fears that the pandemic, when India had one of the world’s longest school closures, would disrupt learning outcomes and lead to children being pulled out of school have proved unfounded, the survey released earlier this week found.
The nationwide household survey of 649,491 children in 15,728 schools in 605 districts across 29 states finds that children are not just back to pre-pandemic levels of learning, but have exceeded earlier outcomes.
For instance, in pre-pandemic 2018, only 28.2% of children in grade 3 could do simple subtraction sums. In 2024, it was up to 33.7%, the highest in the past 10 years. We have “more than a full recovery from the post-pandemic learning losses,” writes director ASER Centre Wilima Wadhwa in an accompanying essay, More than a Recovery, with the report.
“This year’s improvement is being driven by government schools in the early grades,” points out Rukmini Banerjee, chief executive officer, Pratham Education Foundation which facilitates the survey.
Government schools, traditionally regarded as a sort of black-hole in terms of learning, especially in rural India where those who can afford it would rather send their children to private schools, the 2024 survey runs contrary to this stereotype. Private schools are still ahead of government schools in learning outcomes but while government schools have improved and are doing better than at pre-pandemic levels, private schools have shown a decline.
For instance, 23.4% of children in grade 3 in government schools could read a grade 2 text, a significant improvement from 20.9% in 2018. But the same skill in the same grade at private schools has plunged from 40.6% in 2018 to 35.5% in 2024.
ASER finds that almost every child is in school. In the age group 6-14, only 1.6% of children were out-of-school, which is the lowest since 2009 when the Right to Education Act came into effect.
But even as the percentage of out-of-school children has fallen, girls aged between 15 and 16 continue to make up the largest cohort, 8.1% out-of-school, compared to 7.7% of boys of the same age.
And, yet, it’s the girls who’ve made the most progress across grades. For instance, they are ahead of the boys in their ability to read a simple grade 2 text as seen below:
| Girls | Boys | |
|---|---|---|
| Grade 3 | 28.1% | 26% |
| Grade 5 | 50.6% | 46.8% |
| Grade 8 | 73.2% | 68.7% |
Understanding the breakthrough
There are several reasons for the marked improvement in school education.
First, far from being a setback as feared, the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the digital revolution. In 2018, just 36% of rural households had smartphones. With the shift to online learning and virtual classrooms during the pandemic, 74% of rural households had smartphones that their children could access. By 2024, it was 84%.
With easy access to smartphones at home, ASER 2024 finds that 82.2% of children know how to use these devices. But the gender gap remains and girls continue to lag behind boys. Only 62.2% of girls could perform simple digital tasks as setting an alarm or searching for basic information. Among boys it was 70.2%.
Second, the ASER report attributes learning gains to the National Education Policy (NEP), 2020 which made policy shifts from focusing on just completing prescribed curriculums to actually building foundational literacy and numeracy right from the age of three onwards.
This early childhood education has promoted better learning outcomes in the later grades with 80% of all rural three-year-olds and 85% of all four-year-olds—an estimated 100 million children—enrolled in early childhood programmes either at anganwadi centres, pre-primary classes in government schools and in private schools.
Third, says Rukmini Banerjee, a new generation of mothers who went to school now want their children to not just go to school but thrive there. It is these mothers, she says, who demand higher standards from schools and anganwadi centres. They hold the future of their children, and the country, in their hands.
(You can download ASER 2024 here).
