Learning in Govt Schools Back to Pre-Covid Levels

Highlighting key findings from the 2024 ASER report

- Sanjay Maurya

The long shadow cast by the Covid-19 pandemic on educational outcomes may have lifted according to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024 report released Tuesday, with the hand of a government scheme to improve foundational learning and numeracy (FLN) being clearly visible.

According to the report, released by the Pratham Foundation, reading levels among government school students in Class III and V have improved compared to pre-pandemic levels, as measured in the 2018 edition of the report. Those of private school students are better than they were in 2022 (when the impact of the pandemic was still being sharply felt), but still lower than pre-pandemic levels, perhaps because they did not have a targeted initiative like government schools did with the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN) Bharat programme. To be sure, private school students still did better than their government school peers.

According to the report, the reading levels among government school students improved in 2024 with 23.4% of students in Class III and 44.8% in Class V students being able to read a Class II text; the corresponding pre-pandemic levels recorded in 2018 were 20.9% and 44.2%, respectively. In 2022, these were 16.3% and 38.5%. To be sure, despite the improvement, 76.6% of Class III government school students and 55.2% of Class V government schools students are still unable to read Class II text.