Class Struggle for Students

Context: India needs a strategy to overcome the learning deficiencies induced by school closures during Covid.

Steps taken for providing Blended Learning: Based on (DCVTS-4) -

• Live online classes taught by school teachers (63%),
• Providing recorded lectures or online educational/learning videos by teachers (69%),
• Provision of learning materials to students (68%),
• Assessing them through homework, assignments or projects (73%)

The Extent of the Educational Disruption: Based on Delhi Coronavirus Telephone Survey Wave 4 (DCVTS-4)

• Delayed enrolment: About 8% of the children, a majority of whom were 6 or 7, were unable to enrol due to schools being closed.
  • Due to concerns about their admission once the schools are reopened: whether they should be promoted to the next grade based on ‘no-detention’ policy articulated in the Right to Education Act.
• Lack of educational inputs from the school: Even in a relatively prosperous region like Delhi-NCR (National Capital Region), about 18% of children received no educational inputs from the school.
  • Socio-economic inequalities aggravated this:
    • 12% did not have access either to the resources provided by the school or private tuitions.
    • 47% of the poorest children were left out from receiving any inputs from school like live online classes, recorded lectures etc.
• Digital inequality: due to lack of access to a device (Substantial inequality in access to online learning)
  • Urban children (75%) and those from rich households (71%) were more likely to have participated in remote learning than rural children (55%) and from poor households (55%).

Way forward: For addressing the learning crisis.

• Short term measures:
  • Provide intensive remedial classes as the schools reopen: particularly for children in the 6-14 age group, to gain mastery over age-appropriate foundational skills such as reading and arithmetic.
  • Intensive focus on foundational skills:  to bridge inequalities in pre-pandemic schools.
• Long term measures:
  • Ensure ‘learning for all’: According to Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) surveys, a significant proportion of children lack basic reading and arithmetic skills.
  • Improve learning outcomes: through intensive interventions done by the educational NGO Pratham and by starting with intensive programmes designed to create a level playing field.
  • Increase educational expenditure.