It’s Time For A Big Rethink Of Our Pandemic Policy On Schooling

Context: An overview of the pandemic impact on school education and necessary steps to be taken to equip the system to adapt to the new reality.

Impact of the pandemic on school education

• Academic regression: Children have not learnt what they should have learnt this entire year, and many have also forgotten a lot of what they knew in March 2020.
• Ineffectiveness of alternatives: Substitute measures like online classes, mohalla classes, home-based work, etc., only compensated a fraction of the lost year of schooling for overwhelming majority of children.
  • This is because of the lack of access to the net and devices for the vast majority of India’s children and because of the inherent nature of learning by children, for which online education is not suitable.
  • Limited scope: Mohalla classes and other community-based interventions limited to a small number of places and lack of efforts from private schools.
• Bureaucratic mismanagement: Government has ordered to promote all children to the next class without considering the reality of the state of children and teachers.
  • Not facilitating any effective intervention during the pandemic and lack of courage to lead transformative steps.

Way forward

• Open schools with adequate protocols: At the first sign of the tsunami-like second wave abating.
  • Redefine the role of teachers: To be treated like frontline health workers.
• Reconfigure syllabus of all classes: Reducing content load and paring it such that each next class, which will be next year, can take some burden off the previous.
• Allocation of more time: At least six months should be given for all children to remain in the current class, which would give teachers time to cover the reconfigured syllabus for that class.
• Equipping teachers: Teachers must be provided with tools, teaching-learning materials and other support to be able to deal with the syllabus in a short time frame.