News
2025
U/A 16+
Annual Status of Education Report 2024 for rural India has brought some good news —- the learning levels in government schools has seen a significant improvement.There is an almost full recovery of learning levels from the pandemic-induced learning loss across states. The improvement is both in reading and arithmetic. What is even more noteworthy here is that this recovery is “completely driven by government schools despite the fact that private schools have had an edge over the former.”The Pratham CEO, Madhav Chavan has said that they have not seen improvements of this magnitude in the last 20 years since ASER has been presenting data on fundamental reading and arithmetic. He said everything seems to point towards the New Education Policy, 2020 and its focus on foundational skills.ASER, led by Pratham Foundation, a non-profit with a focus on children’s enrolment and learning abilities in rural India, this year returned to its "basic" nationwide survey in 2024, reaching almost all rural districts in India.The pandemic-induced shut downs in 2020 and 2021 had resulted in major learning losses among students across India. The 2024 survey covered 605 rural districts across states, nearly 18000 villages, over 3.5 lakh households, and nearly 6.5 lakh children in the 3-16 age group.According to the report, even though in rural India, government schools have always lagged behind private schools in terms of learning levels, survey statistics show that the recovery “has really been in government schools, with learning levels in private schools still below their pre-pandemic levels”.For instance, the survey shows that in 2024, the proportion of children in class 3 able to read a class 2 level text in government schools increased was 23.4%, up from 16.3% in 2022, when schools re-opened after a gap of two years. However, the recovery in private schools was more muted—from 33.1% in 2022 to 35.5% in 2024, lower than the pre-pandemic level in 2018.This proportion was 20.9% in government schools as compared to 40.6% in private schools in 2018. In 2022, while learning levels in all schools suffered, the decline in private schools was far greater than in government schools, though the private school advantage remained the same, namely, twice as high as government school levels.Reading levels in class 5 tell a similar story. In arithmetic, both government and private schools have seen large jumps in learning levels, with 2024 levels surpassing levels 10 years ago.However, here again, the gains in government schools have been far greater than those in private schools. For instance, between 2022 and 2024, the proportion of children able to do subtraction in class 3 increased by 36.6%—from 20.2% to 27.6%—in government schools as compared to just 10.2% in private schools, the report stated.Highlighting the differences between government-run and private schools, the report said that children who go to private schools come from more affluent homes and have more educated parents—household characteristics that are positively correlated to learning. “Therefore, attributing the entire difference in learning levels to a school effect is incorrect. Nevertheless, even after controlling for these household characteristics, private schools do have an edge in learning over government schools,” it said.Wilima Wadhwa, director of the ASER Centre, said the 2024 estimates are, therefore, extremely useful for a host of reasons. She said: “Given that the ASER assessment is essentially a floor-level foundational learning assessment, data from this survey will also help track the progress of central government initiatives like the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN) Bharat mission across the country.”Show more