Story of Recovery – ASER Survey 2022 | 19th January 2023 | UPSC Daily Editorial Analysis

What's the article about?

• It talks about key findings of the first ASER Survey (ASER 2022) released after the pandemic.

Relevance:

• GS2: Issues Relating to Development and Management of Social Sector/Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources;
• Essay;
• Prelims

Context:

• The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), which sheds light on learning outcomes in schools released after a gap of 4 years.
• The Covid pandemic had caused schools to shut down in March 2020, and India had one of the longest school closures in the world.
• In 2021 NGO Pratham conducted representative surveys in three states in 2021 — Karnataka, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal.
• Unlike 2021, ASER 2022 is a full nationwide survey and its findings are important for our education system.

What is an ASER Survey?

• It is a nationwide survey of rural education and learning outcomes in terms of reading and arithmetic skills that has been conducted by the NGO Pratham.
• It uses Census 2011 as the sampling frame and continues to be an important national source of information about children’s foundational skills across the country.
• It sheds light on learning outcomes in schools. It is a key national survey that captures the state of foundational literacy and numeracy in the country.

Analysis:

• Fall in both reading and maths:
  • For the country as a whole, learning levels had been rising slowly between 2014 and 2018, after being stagnant for several years.
  • For example, at the all-India level, the proportion of children in Class III who could read a Class II level text (a proxy for grade-level reading) had risen from 23.6 per cent in 2014 to 27.2 per cent in 2018.
  • ASER 2022 shows a big drop in this proportion to 20.5 per cent.
  • This 7 percentage point fall is huge, given how slowly the all-India numbers move and confirms fears of large learning losses caused by the pandemic.
  • In maths also, learning levels had risen slowly between 2014 and 2018. The 2022 estimates show a drop here as well although much smaller than in the case of reading.
• NEP and FLN:

  • Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN): FLN is broadly conceptualised as a child’s ability to read basic texts and solve basic maths problems (such as addition and subtraction). Foundational Literacy and Numeracy is one of the major themes of the NEP 2020. In 2021, the NIPUN-Bharat programme was launched with a vision to ensure universal literacy and numeracy for Class 3 children by 2026-27.

  • Another big development during 2020-21 was the introduction of the new National Education Policy (NEP) in 2020.
  • For the first time, there was a big focus on the early years and the importance of foundational competencies.
  • Once schools reopened, states moved quickly and almost all states have made a major push in the area of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) under the NIPUN Bharat mission (National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy).
  • This push is reflected in the ASER 2022 data.
  • At the all-India level, 81 per cent schools responded that they had received such a directive and 83 per cent said that at least one teacher in the school had been trained on FLN.

Way Forward:

• While there have been learning losses, there has also been recovery once the schools reopened. Accounting for all the interim measurements, ASER 2022 estimates tell a story of recovery rather than one of loss.