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.

No Sh*t!!

The Prime Minister has launched, with much fanfare, a programme to clean India over the next five years, just in time for the Mahatma's 150th birth anniversary.  A thoroughly laudable objective, but one that sadly runs the real risk of being reduced to tokenism and forgotten once the cameras have been put away. Already there are snickers in the media and cynical comments about the mess left behind after the inaugural ceremonies, proof if any were needed, that it will be difficult to change public perception in a hurry.

Along with the plans for building toilets in schools and villages, there has also been discussion about IEC programmes - information, education and communication - to create mass awareness about the importance of cleanliness and good sanitation.  And with good cause - nearly 53% Indians still defecate in the open, with 47% finding it "pleasurable and more convenient", and the less said about our cleanliness habits the better.  In many ways, the situation is reminiscent of 1950s America, where more homes then had television sets than bathrooms.  And yet, in the space of a few generations, that picture has changed completely.

In all the public debate resulting from the PM's initiative, it seems to me that an important component of IEC has been missed; or at least, has not found significant mention.  This is of course, the need for a comprehensive Water & Sanitation programme to be run in our schools.  If we are truly serious about ensuring a clean nation, we need to begin young.  And what better place to begin than in our schools?  The present generation may or may not be educatable, but a well designed programme implemented in school over the next five years could change the future of this country.

Many years ago, I used to run a joint Government of India and UN project called Janshala.  In Karnataka, where the project ran in a few blocks, we implemented a Water & Sanitation programme with the help of UNICEF that involved teaching children how to use the school toilets.  This included usage, cleaning and personal hygiene, and helping the children to understand how disease could spread due to poor sanitation habits.  The programme was a great success in improving attendance and retention rates in the schools, particularly of girls who are the most vulnerable to dropping out in the absence of toilets.

More interesting however, was the unintended fall out of the programme.  A longitudinal study taken up at the time showed that as the children got accustomed to using toilets in school, they began to demand them at home.  Over time, this led to the construction of toilets in village homes, and to families of these children also acquiring good sanitation habits.  The school programme ended up having a multiplier effect, impacting not just the children's cleanliness habits, but also their families.  It is precisely this kind of programme that we should be planning for the schools now.

Instead of prescribing Mr Dina Nath Batra's flights of fancy to young minds, wouldn't it be great if State governments worked out and included a WatSan module in the school curriculum?  Combined with the mass construction of toilets in schools by governments and companies undertaking CSR works, this could be the one thing that changes the India we know.

To Sir (or Ma'am) With Love

What does it say about a country where only 2 percent of 750,000 teachers holding a formal Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) degree or a Diploma in Education are able to clear a simple Teacher Eligibility Test that would make them eligible to teach Grades 1 through 8?  Where the results for this year are actually viewed as an improvement over last year, because there was a reduction in those who failed from 99 percent to 98?  Would you really have any hope for that country's education system, or for the future of its children? 

Welcome to India in 2014.  The fact that CBSE's Central Teacher Eligibility Test (CTET) held in January witnessed such dismal results should be a wakeup call for anyone interested in the country's education system. 

As the number of schools in the country, both in the government and private sectors, has increased rapidly over the last decades, the demand for quality teachers has increased exponentially.  Unfortunately, the number and type of teachers needed are just not available.  Implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (more commonly known as the Right to Education Act) alone requires an estimated 1.4 million additional teachers in our classrooms, for just Grades 1 to 8; this doesn’t include the already existing 500,000 vacant positions.  And the teacher training institutes currently available are just not up to the task.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that with the exception of B.El.Ed degree courses or some correspondence courses, most of our regular B.Ed or D.Ed programmes are of one year duration, as compared to other countries where such programmes take at least 3-4 years to complete.  This means that the student's knowledge of her subject is assumed, and the course concentrates – in the limited time it has – on the skills required to be a teacher in the classroom.  Given the reality of most undergraduate degree colleges in the country, this assumption is dangerous, as in many cases graduation is no guarantee of either understanding or knowledge of the subject.  The poor state of higher education thus has its impact on school education, which in turn sends poorly prepared children (from those who remain in the system) to participate in college education, thereby reinforcing the vicious cycle of mediocrity and ineffectiveness.  The situation is compounded by the fact that anyone with a secondary school education is also eligible to sit for the CTET, as long as they have completed, or are in the final year of, a 2-year D.Ed or 4-year B.El.Ed programme; in the former case, there is clearly not enough time to acquire the required subject knowledge.

While there has been much discussion of school education and learning outcomes in recent years, teacher education has not been the focus of that discussion as often as it should have been.  We need to recognise that the teacher is a crucial component of the school system, and that without providing a renewed sense of professionalism, education and self worth to those who take up teaching as a career, we will be hard pressed to make progress in the classroom.  It is time to reinvent teacher education and indeed, teaching as a career, from the ground up, if we are to witness dramatic change in learning outcomes.

The majority of school teachers in India are employed in the government sector, since nearly 85 percent schools are under government management.  Yet it is not as if the issue of quality is confined only to this group.  With few exceptions, most private schools also suffer from the same problems.  During the time that I ran the premium Millennium schools, it never failed to surprise me that senior teachers (and sometimes even Principals!) could be so careless, sloppy and unprofessional.  I sat through a number of classes in various schools, and came away appalled at the fact that teachers of this standard were actually allowed to stand up in class and influence young minds.

What then do we need to do to bring about meaningful change?  There are several possibilities, but the following would probably be good first steps:

·         There is a strong case for partially decentralising teacher education to the States, and allowing them to determine the curriculum and duration of the B.Ed courses conducted in their jurisdictions.  This would allow more contextually relevant degree courses to develop, with training colleges free to create a cadre of teachers focused on the needs of their State.

·         The duration of B.Ed courses needs to increase, in line with international practice, and in order to incorporate some subject learning as well.  This would ensure that students graduating from the programme would also carry with them the much needed subject skills.

·         Under training teachers need more practical exposure to classrooms and children, in order to develop their teaching and management skills.  This means a much closer relationship between schools and colleges and/or teacher education institutions.

·         The number of teacher training institutions needs to increase drastically; at the same time, ensuring quality remains a strong concern.  We need to review the multi-zillion clearances needed to start such institutions and move towards a system of single-window approvals.

·         As in any other profession, intensive periodic in-service training programmes need to be planned that allow teachers to hone their skills and revise basics; as in the US, we may eventually consider a licensing system and periodic examinations that keep valid a teacher's license to teach.  It may be noted that the kind of superficial 20-day in-service training practiced under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) certainly does not meet the needs of continuing education for teachers.

·         We need to find ways to reduce the social and economic distance between teacher and taught; this means more emphasis on recruiting local teachers, who come from the community they teach. This would additionally have the advantage of ensuring more or less regular availability of the teacher in the classroom; if she belongs to the area, there are fewer incentives for her to go AWOL.

·         Bring back the school inspectorate system that we have systematically destroyed through projects and disuse.  The Schools Inspector played a very significant role in ensuring that quality in the classroom was maintained; we need to recreate a similar system of regular monitoring to ensure enough time-on-task as well as improvements in outcomes.

·         Stop just talking about closer linkages between the District Institutes of Education and Training (DIET) and SSA structures and actually do something about them.  In addition, project structures like SSA need to eventually move into the State Education Departments so that there is greater ownership of the education bureaucracy, and a single, holistic approach to school education.

·         Move away from seniority as the only criteria for promotion and career advancement to a system that takes merit and performance into account, and make teaching an attractive profession for bright young people.

Teachers are the backbone of the education system; if they are dysfunctional, so is the system.  The time to make these changes is now.  Otherwise we will see many more anguished letters like this one – http://goo.gl/gjqh66.  To me, this is a heart-breaking example of everything that is wrong with our schools and teachers.