COVID19 and school education

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our world in ways that we are only just beginning to understand, and many of those changes seem likely to continue for a long time to come. At no time in our history have human beings been as technologically advanced as we are today, nor more helpless in the face of this illness which spreads like wildfire and appears invincible.

Like so many others, the school sector is also re-examining long held beliefs and existing systems. The more fortunate and better provisioned schools are in the position of being able to move many of their teaching and learning activities online, using a variety of tools such as video conferencing, social media, and the internet, but such schools in our country represent a microscopic minority. The reality for those who attend other schools is often inadequate infrastructure, missing teachers, an incomplete education, and an inability of the system to adapt to even routine changes.

Several commentators have in recent days extolled the benefits of educational technology, including various online platforms, video classes, and the like, but their focus is clearly the privately managed, fee-charging schools beloved of the middle class. Even in these schools however, bandwidth limitations and equipment failures are likely to pose a challenge to uninterrupted delivery, while the efficacy of education in this form for younger children is yet to be established. It is also safe to say that such facilities are unlikely to be available to children who attend government schools, or even those who attend low-cost budget private schools, which provide an essential service to so many despite multiple regulatory hurdles.

Many state governments, such as Himachal Pradesh, have announced that they would record lessons on video and send them out to children in state schools using WhatsApp. Most of the methods under discussion however, seem to require internet-based solutions, which would at least call for the use of a smartphone. The reality is that too many children in our country have access to neither. Even if a few were able to make use of such lessons, there is no clarity if and how they would address those with special needs, such as children with visual or aural disabilities.

A significant challenge to any form of remote learning is the fact that too few children have learning support at home, since many may be first generation learners. The fallout of the ongoing pandemic has thus the potential to widen the already existing learning gap between educationally and socio-economically advantaged and disadvantaged students and communities. Those who were already marginalised run the risk of being further discriminated against, with gender, poverty, digital, and disability gaps set to grow exponentially. Additionally, a continued lockdown with a focus on remote learning raises questions of safety for many, given the risk of increasing frustration among adults at home and possible domestic violence.

The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, places on the government the responsibility for ensuring that all children receive elementary education as a matter of right. Over the last 20-25 years, the government has invested, among other things, in school infrastructure, teachers, professional development, curricular reform, and management improvements. But all of these were predicated on children physically attending a class, with a teacher to support them; suddenly, everything has changed. Our new circumstances do not dilute the responsibility of government to ensure the education of all children, but with schools shut and social distancing norms in place, new ways of reaching students will need to be found.

One immediate solution is the redeployment of mass media channels to carry age and grade appropriate lessons in a structured manner, something that India has substantial experience of earlier. Both Doordarshan and All India Radio (AIR) have been used for widespread dissemination of social messaging and learning, including for the National Literacy Mission. The use of television for education in India peaked between 2004-2010, when we were one of the few countries in the world to have a satellite (EduSat) dedicated exclusively to broadcasting educational TV content for students.

While Doordarshan reaches most parts of the country, the penetration of radio to the remotest areas in India has few equals anywhere in the world. The use of radio for education, particularly at times of crisis, is well known globally. International agencies and national governments have run radio-based education programmes in countries affected by crises all over the world, as for instance in Chad in 2017 when school education was impacted by Boko Haram terrorism. In India, we have a long history of learning programmes delivered by radio, by government as well as NGOs; one of the earliest examples was the school broadcast project of AIR of 1937 that operated in Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, and Mumbai. Government began using radio for literacy programmes in 1956, while IGNOU has used it for university students since the early nineties.

The Gyan Vani FM channel, which briefly went off air, was restarted in 2017 and is currently being used by IGNOU from 8 am to 8 pm daily to provide lessons to students, who can phone in with any questions they might have. However, Gyan Vani only reaches a limited number of locations, being an FM channel. What we need is to explore ways by which the reach of Gyan Vani can be expanded to cover more parts of the country using the AIR network, providing content that is relevant to school children as well as those at higher levels. At a time when physical attendance in school is a challenge, both TV and radio can play a critical role in ensuring that learning does not suffer.

Some states and examination boards have announced that they will automatically promote all students in grades 1 to 8 this year which means that there will be no formal assessment of learning. Given that there were already concerns around the relatively low levels of learning in the country despite the many interventions that have taken place over the years, this step, while unavoidable in the present circumstances, is likely to have an impact on student progress in succeeding years. We will have to consider how best to address this situation in the form of remedial measures when the next academic session begins, as well as simple methods of quick formative assessment, aimed at supporting the learning process.

We also need to start planning for the reality that school education for many children is likely to be interrupted, at least in the short run, no matter what strategies are used in the interim. To ensure children do not lose time for no fault of their own, we might wish to consider accelerated learning programmes, as have been used successfully in other crisis-hit countries, allowing students to combine and complete two or possibly three school years in a shorter time frame so that they can complete the relevant educational stage on time. This will require planning for associated reviews of the curriculum and its compression, and teacher and leadership training for implementation.

It is important though, to remember that these are all short-term solutions. In the long run, no matter what strategy is adopted, the quality of remote learning can never compare well with regular schooling. Some skills, like teamwork and character building, can only take place when there is an opportunity to work in collaboration with other students and teachers in a physical school setting. Most importantly, schools remain institutions of socialisation for the young, something that cannot be imparted remotely through radio or TV programmes. Unless we wish to see a very different society in future, we will need to find ways to make schools functional again.

This pandemic is in many ways an opportunity to reimagine how school education is delivered, not only in India, but also worldwide. Even after the lockdown restrictions are lifted, it seems likely that the nature of teaching and learning will change significantly. How we handle these changes over the next few months, and how we creatively find solutions to allow schools to reopen, will determine the future we leave to our children.

Reforming Assessment - Time for Change

The recent CBSE paper leak presents an occasion to consider wide-ranging reforms in the process by which we assess student learning in our schools to make it more pedagogically appropriate, less stressful, and relevant to modern society. At a time when public discourse on education commonly references 21^st century skills, a Board examination that only emphasises rote learning and the ability to memorise and reproduce facts is an anachronism that has outlived its utility.

The purpose of assessment should be to illuminate where a learner is on her path of learning at a given point in time. This implies that learning is a continuous, ongoing process that does not end at a particular stage, in keeping with the internationally accepted principles of lifelong learning. Equally importantly, the assessment of learning should lead to an understanding of a student’s ability to construct and apply learnt knowledge as opposed to her ability to memorise factual information that will not be retained after the examination.

A conscious move away from the current situation was made when the Right to Education Bill, 2005, was drafted on the basis of recommendations of a sub-committee of the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE). While recommending the removal of all Board examinations at grade 8 level and a no-detention policy, the sub-committee also recommended the introduction of Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) to ensure that learning was assessed regularly through the school year in order to track student progress. This came from the belief that labelling children examination failures at such a young age was harmful to their self-esteem and their ability to stay engaged with learning. The sub-committee recognised that the majority of children in the schooling system come from less privileged backgrounds, many of them being first generation school-goers, and failing them would have the immediate consequence of pushing them out of school.

As the then Director in the Ministry of HRD who assisted the sub-committee and worked on the draft, I can vouch for the fact that CCE at the elementary stage (grades 1 through 8) was expected to be driven by NCERT and customised by states based on their own specific requirements. It was never envisaged that CBSE, a Board of secondary education, would be responsible for its design and implementation, as eventually happened. The manner in which CCE was implemented carried within itself the seeds of its own downfall, increasing pressure on teachers and establishing a complicated assessment system that was never fully understood by those most affected by it.

Assessment of children’s learning should be an in-built mechanism, with teachers undertaking regular, ongoing monitoring of what has been learnt by the individual child so that corrective action can be taken in time – in other words, assessment for learning. This is of course, easier said than done, given the conditions under which many teachers function, especially in government schools, with multi-grade classrooms, and pupil-teacher ratios in excess of 100:1 in many states. Yet a portfolio containing work done by each child over a period of time remains the best indicator of student progress and can help to scaffold and support individual learning.

This in-classroom assessment should be accompanied by diagnostic, low-stakes, external assessments to indicate the health of the education system. The results of such assessments, such as the National Achievement Survey (NAS) recently carried out by NCERT, provide policy makers with clear information about the functioning of the system and help to identify shortcomings for correction. After the poor showing of Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009, India has stayed away from international learning assessments like PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS, but there has been some discussion lately around the possibility of participation in PISA 2021. In such a situation, undertaking national diagnostic assessments that provide comparative data over time and across regions acquires renewed importance.

Using Board examination results for selection to higher education institutions has become an annual farce, with students scoring unrealistically high marks, pushing up the cut off levels each year. Eliminating the Board examination altogether and replacing it with an individual entrance test or a standardised assessment like an indigenously developed GRE- or GMAT-like test would remove stress and provide a reliable mechanism for selection. Combined with a portfolio describing a student’s progress over the years, this would provide a far more accurate picture of abilities than the current Board results.

With the establishment of the new National Testing Agency announced in the last Budget, there is an historic opportunity to initiate far-reaching reforms in the way in which we assess student learning, and to drag our education system into the 21^st century. It is unfortunate that the committee set up to review the CBSE leak has its mandate confined to the leaks only, instead of focusing on the big picture. The earlier experiment of CCE may not have been fully successful, but that should not deter us from putting in place more carefully designed assessment systems that help all stakeholders, and most of all, our children.

Redefining Access

The debate about school education in India has focused on many things – enrolment, retention, learning outcomes, teacher preparedness, vocational training, etc, but over the last few decades, we seem to have taken one thing for granted.  This is our definition of the term “access”, i.e., the availability of a school to every child.  Since the 1970s, when the 2^nd All India Education Survey took place, this concept has been defined in terms of physical proximity; in other words, the measure of a school’s availability to a child lies in its distance from her home, with the idea being that a school should be provided within the immediate neighbourhood.  Every government policy or law thus prescribes access in such language – a primary school within 1 kilometre of the residence of a child, an upper primary school within 3 kilometres, and a secondary school within 5 kilometres.

In a soon-to-be-published NUEPA/World Bank study on teachers in the Indian education system, Vimala Ramachandran et al[1] analyse DISE data to show that about one-third of all elementary schools have less than 50 children enrolled, while 11 percent of primary and 14 percent of secondary schools have two teachers or less.  At secondary level, only 3.3 percent schools have all the five subject teachers and head teacher prescribed.  Worse, fully a quarter of all government secondary schools operate out of two classrooms or less.

The exponential increase in the number of schools over the last decade as a result of the impact of programmes like Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) and the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, has led to an increase in the number of schools with less than optimal infrastructure or numbers of children and/or teachers.  What the foregoing numbers indicate is that the rapid expansion of the school system in the last few years has not been fully efficient on the ground.

Additionally, learning outcomes continue to remain a matter of concern despite the substantial increase in infrastructure, teacher appointments and enrolment.  Each succeeding ASER[2] report has highlighted the continued decline in learning levels and the increasing shift to private schools in rural areas, notwithstanding the opening of many more State schools.  Worryingly, the number of children in Class 5 unable to read a Class 2 text has actually increased from 47 percent in 2006 to 52 percent in 2014, even though the number of elementary schools increased from 1 million to 1.45 million during the same period!

This single minded expansion of school infrastructure has also contributed directly to the non-availability of enough trained and qualified teachers for all the schools and classes being opened under various programmes.  At the elementary school level alone, there are 500,000 teacher vacancies, with another 500,000 being needed to meet the norms stipulated by the Right to Education Act; existing teacher training colleges are simply unable to produce the required number of graduates.  Subject teachers are increasingly hard to find.  When combined with the well-known issues of teacher absenteeism, sub-contracting, etc, this effectively means that enough skilled teachers are simply not available to children in the classroom.

For the teachers themselves, this unprecedented expansion of the school system has not been without grief.  Apart from the personal difficulties of being posted to remote and inaccessible areas, those posted to single or two-teacher schools find themselves deprived of any opportunity for peer learning and thus, professional and personal growth.  And taking leave, attending training programmes away from school, or being deputed for several miscellaneous government duties, nearly always means leaving students without a teacher, further impacting already poor learning outcomes in the classroom.

All things considered, it appears that in practice the concept of access has been reduced to the ability to access a building instead a fully functional school.  This implies the need to re-examine our fundamental definition of access, and define it instead as the ability to attend a school with appropriate infrastructure and adequate numbers of qualified teachers, and to be enabled to achieve predefined learning outcomes, even if such a school is not within the existing norms for distance. Such a definition would compel us to look beyond availability of mere infrastructure, and focus on all the additional conditions that are essential to improve learning outcomes, thus changing the focus of the debate from mere physical proximity to school provisioning, empowerment of staff and administrators, and learning achievements.

Such a discussion is neither new nor unknown; in a policy brief published in 2009, the DFID-supported Consortium for Research on Education, Access, Transitions and Equity (CREATE) had defined “meaningful access” as “…access (that) requires high attendance rates, progression through grades with little or no repetition, and learning outcomes that confirm that basic skills are being mastered”^[3].  Writing in 2012, Rashmi Diwan of NUEPA pointed out how “…poor connectivity, lack of interaction with peer group of teachers and lack of need-based training to teachers coupled with inadequate and poor quality of school facilities”[4] made teaching in such schools far more complex.

If a new parameter of access is accepted, it would be possible to consolidate scattered existing schools into whole and viable institutions that are fully staffed and infrastructurally complete, yielding economies of scale as well as gains in efficiency.  In cases where the school is located beyond distances as currently understood, transport facilities or transport vouchers could be provided to eliminate associated costs.  Clearly this is not an option that would be appropriate for very young children – it may still be relevant to retain the 1 km norm for primary school.  However for children enrolled in classes 6 onwards, when the need for specialised subject teachers kicks in, it could potentially change the nature of schooling, while significantly impacting learning outcomes.

At the same time, while government accounts for just over three-fourths of all elementary schools, at secondary and higher secondary level, schools under private management are 37 percent and 40 percent respectively.  In other words, there are far more secondary schools available outside the government system, accounting for nearly 40 percent of all students enrolled.  It may also be possible to explore the use of these schools to admit children who would otherwise have accessed ill-equipped government schools, through the use of government-issued vouchers that cover the cost of tuition, books, uniforms, etc.  Some pilots involving such vouchers have been tried in India, notably by the Centre for Civil Society (www.ccsindia.org), with some success.

The ongoing review of the National Education Policy by the Ministry of HRD offers an opportunity to reconsider some of these issues. In a country that aspires to take its place on the world stage, education remains one of the most important sectors and needs immediate attention; we cannot continue to plan on the basis of concepts and philosophies that were relevant four decades ago.

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[1] Vimala Ramachandran, Prerna Goel Chatterjee, Nikhil Mathur, NUEPA; Aparna Ravi, CLPR; Toby Linden, Tara Beteille, Sangeeta Dey, Sangeeta Goel, Chiraag Mehta, The World Bank.

[2] Annual Status of Education Report, brought out by the NGO, Pratham. www.asercentre.org

[3] http://tinyurl.com/oorz25a, accessed 28.04.2015

[4] Diwan, Rashmi (2012), Indian Small Schools -  A Review of Issues and Related Concerns, NUEPA Occasional Paper 40, National University of Educational Planning and Administration, New Delhi.