Dr Rukmini Banerji on ASER 2022: ‘Enrolment is higher than 98% despite Covid, people realise schooling is important’

On the rise in enrolment

Looking back, we have to take our long-running trend of getting closer to universal enrolment quite seriously. Something has happened in the past few years to reinforce the faith in schooling even more. I had feared that the older children, particularly girls, would drop out post-pandemic given the economic distress that a lot of rural families went through but this didn’t happen.

Not only have the children come back, the out-of-school numbers have gone down for the older age groups, even for those who are over 14. Out-of-school numbers of girls in the 15 to 16-year-old category have also come down. There is a big resounding support to the idea that schooling is important for everyone, not only till the compulsory age of 14 but even beyond it.

On attendance patterns

The enrolment numbers have gone up or changed but we don’t see much change in attendance patterns. Now that we have a high enrolment rate, we need to look at attendance much more seriously. In some states, there isn’t much difference between attendance and enrolment. A lot of the southern and western states are like that. But we have several states where average attendance on a given day is between 55 per cent and 60 per cent, which poses big problems.

We need ways, whether at the district, block or cluster level, to track attendance and draw up plans to address chronically absent patterns. So while we are saying that older children are all enrolled in school, we don’t have a way of looking at disaggregated data by age or by class in ASER. This needs to be done routinely and will ensure there is no difference between enrolment and attendance on a given day.

On learning loss

Many changes happened between 2018 (when the previous ASER report came) and 2022. From September 2018 to March 2020, schools were open and it was business as usual.

Schools closed down from March 2020 and opened in various states in a graded manner between 2021 and 2022. Different states opened their primary and elementary schools at different times. Most schools opened April 2022 onwards only to break for summer vacation. Between July and September, almost all schools were open.

The ASER was able to do a field survey in three states which teaches us something about what happened during this period. Karnataka was surveyed in February 2021, Chhattisgarh in October-November 2021 and West Bengal in December 2021. Now if I look at the statewise data of 2018, 2021 and 2022, then the biggest drop is actually between 2018 and 2021. Probably if we had done a 2020 survey, the biggest drop would be between 2020 and 2021. Then you see a recovery. Chhattisgarh shows a big recovery, West Bengal is slightly lesser and Karnataka not as much. But we are capturing a loss and a recovery. We can interpret the recovery to what schools did when they re-opened. The 2022 numbers have a component of recovery in them as well.

A learning loss was expected. Younger children who are in Class III today did not have much schooling at all. Maybe, they didn’t even attend class I. But I am actually surprised that their learning levels aren’t lower, which means that something was going on with them during the gap year. If I look at Class III children, their reading ability is of a Class II level while their ability to subtract, which most states expect their children to be adept at by Class II, has gone down from roughly 30 per cent to between 20 per cent and 25 per cent. After two years of not attending regular school, the loss to me isn’t as surprising. It could have been much worse.

Dr Rukmini Banerji (right) was in conversation with Uma Vishnu, Deputy Editor

On variation in learning levels within grades

If I look at the learning levels of say Class III in 2018 and compare that to 2022, there is a greater variation. Take Himachal Pradesh. In 2018, 70 per cent of Class III students were either at grade level or just below. They were either able to read the story level or a paragraph level. That number has gone down to 50 per cent in 2020 but what is interesting is that the variation at the lower end of the distribution has increased.

So the teacher in Himachal has to now teach Class III differently because this is not her usual class composition. She has to spend much more time with those who are struggling well below grade level. It’s not just that there’s a learning loss, the variance has gone up and, therefore, how we cope with the more varied set of kids is something that we have to grapple with.

I think this age-grade linear progression, or finishing your syllabus in the given year, is going to work even less well now than it did before.

For kids who are in classes three, four and five, who are actually cognitively higher, put the grade level curriculum aside for now. Even our new education policy talks about achieving foundational literacy and numeracy. Suppose I am a Class IV kid and am still struggling with reading words, I need help at that level. Very soon I’ll be actually reading sentences. But if you give me only my Class IV curriculum, I’m not going to be able to cope with it. You need to put your grade level curriculum aside, even if it is for an hour or two a day, to help these children and when you do that, they pick up very quickly.

On the digital divide

While there was an increase in the use of smartphones, they were usually in the custody of the earning member, not the child. A lot of rural primary schools did not even attempt to pursue online teaching this way. We cannot discount the efforts teachers made at local levels. In Himachal Pradesh, they actually went door-to-door and gave worksheets and textbooks. Governments across the board distributed textbooks even in the first year of COVID-19 and by September many states had distributed their textbooks. For a bulk of rural children in primary grades, e-learning wasn’t even an option and there were efforts to do things on the radio and TV, which we should learn from.

On ways to recover learning loss

If we build up the basics appropriately with specialised attention, children will catch up. Class IV and V students caught up quite quickly but Class III students needed more help. But at least for the basic level, if we devoted an hour a day on reading and maths, they were able to bounce back. Last year, we mobilised a lot of volunteers, older, educated teens who could help younger kids.