Student enrolments increased to more than pre-pandemic levels, but the learning gap widened for foundational skills in reading and arithmetic, reversing several years of improvement, finds the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2022, released by Pratham, a nongovernmental organisation.
Key points
- The national level study shows that despite school closures during the pandemic, the overall enrolment figures, which have been above 95% for the past 15 years for the six- to14 age group, increased from 97.2% in 2018 to 98.4% in 2022.
- More than 98 per cent of 6-16 year-olds are in school. It’s heartening that the proportion of out-of-school girls has fallen to 2 per cent.
- The percentage of Class 3 students who can read a Class 2 book has fallen by nearly 7 percentage points since the last nationwide ASER survey in 2018. The loss in numerical skills is less steep — about 2.3 per cent.
- The proportion of students taking private tuition in classes 1 to 8 has moved up from 26.4 per cent in 2018 to 30.5 per cent in 2022.
- Bihar and Jharkhand are high tuition states – 70 per cent of children in Bihar and 45 per cent in Jharkhand are taking tuition in 2022 as compared to only 10 per cent children in Himachal Pradesh and 15 per cent in Maharashtra.
About ASER survey
- The ASER is a house- hold survey conducted across 616 rural districts covering 6.9 lakh children in the three to16 age group to record their schooling status and assess their basic reading and arithmetic skills.
- ASER (first conducted in 2005) is an annual, citizen-led household survey to understand whether children in rural India are enrolled in school and whether they are learning.
