A year later, counting the Covid-19 pandemic's toll on school education

Price paid by India's less advantaged students: Likely fall in girls' enrolment, migration from private to govt schools, a deep loss of learning

“Hamein ek saal ki chutti hai, purey saal ki party (We have a one-year break, and it’s a year-long party),” says seven-year-old Shalom Rana, who studies in Class 2 in a government school in Dehradun’s Jakhan area.
 
Shalom, his older sister and brother are delighted that they are free to play all day and that they can help their single mother with chores. Like millions of other disadvantaged children in India who do not have a smartphone at home, the closure of schools owing to the Covid-19 pandemic has meant the end of all education for the Rana siblings. 

 
One year into the pandemic may be a good time to assess how it affected India’s K-12 (kindergarten to Class 12) education sector, especially the bottom 150-200 million. But bear in mind that at present, everyone is reacting to preliminary surveys, anecdotal evidence and what they “think” may be happening. As of now, there is almost no nationwide comprehensive, data-driven evidence that analyses the impact of the pandemic on India’s schoolchildren.
 

Pratham’s ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) Wave 1 report conducted by phone in October 2020, the results of which became available earlier this month, provides some clues. The report says that there has been no decline in enrolments or any clear intent to withdraw from school. “The actual data on total enrolment numbers will be known only after schools fully reopen countrywide,” explains Pratham’s founder and head, Madhav Chavan. He adds, however, that very few admit to thinking on these lines when surveyed.

 
Most experts expect a fall in enrolments for girls once schools reopen. Safeena Hussein, who runs the non-profit, Educate Girls, which works in the villages of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, pointed this out early in the lockdown. She maintains that it is a “safe assumption” since in many rural areas girls’ education is already not a priority for many parents. During these tough Covid times when parents are struggling to make ends meet and need more hands at home, schooling for girls may be one of the first casualties.
 
Globally, 20 million adolescent girls are expected to fall out of the school net post the pandemic, and a substantial number of them could be in India.

 
Hussein reveals that there is anecdotal evidence that girls of marriageable age in rural Rajasthan and other backward areas are being sent to their prospective husbands’ homes even before they complete schooling. She expects adolescent girls to take the biggest hit. When she spoke to this writer, Hussein was heading to several villages in Uttar Pradesh in areas such as Rae Bareli, Mirzapur and Chitrakoot, and expected to have a deeper on-ground picture after the visit.
 
The ASER Wave 1 survey also points to a clear shift of students from private to government schools. The enrolment of boys in government schools went up from 62 per cent to 66 per cent and that of girls rose from 70 per cent to 73 per cent, since 2018 (the last comparable survey).

 
The reasons for this are twofold: Financial distress, which has made it tough for parents to pay private school fees, and the closure of many budget private schools in the wake of the pandemic. Experts say that the shift to free government schools may sharpen as more budget private schools shut down, unable to survive the crisis.
 
Everyone agrees that there has been a severe loss of learning across grades for students with little or no access to online and digital platforms. The cessation of physical classes, and the fact that many urban schoolchildren who migrated to the villages along with their parents are yet to be enrolled in a rural local school, have resulted in them falling off the learning map. Most predict that the decline in learning levels might persist even after they go back to school, as the urban alternative is usually superior to the rural one.

 
Although well-intentioned state governments (using initiatives like the DIKSHA platform) and NGOs like Pratham, Avanti Learning and others have made many efforts to ensure that learning continues, it’s far from clear what impact these have had in the past year. Smartphone penetration is up and textbooks and WhatsApp lessons have reached a substantial number of children, but whether this has translated into actual learning remains opaque and uncertain. The reach of education has been higher in states with greater smartphone penetration, but “overall, the impact of digital means of reaching children is not impressive, whether in government or private schools,” says Chavan.

 
Bikkrama Daulet Singh, co-managing director of Central Square foundation, a body that works to improve the school education system in India, agrees that while Avanti, Diksha and other similar platforms have made an aggressive effort to target more students than ever before, “it is fair to say that we don’t yet know if a unique child is consistently consuming the content and improving learning”. He adds that some randomised control trial experiments are on and these should provide a clearer picture in due course.
 
What is clear, though, is that it is imperative to take remedial steps and attempt to bridge the gaps that will invariably hit us down the line. State governments and civil society bodies need to shape up and strengthen their systems to avoid a repeat of this in the future.

 
The pandemic has brought home another sad reality for parents, teachers, policymakers and other stakeholders. Many children, especially the younger ones, have been overjoyed with the freedom from school life. Shiny-eyed and visibly happy, Shalom has promised his mother that he will wear a mask for another year on the condition that she doesn’t send him back to school.
 
It’s a telling and not-so-happy verdict on India’s imperfect education edifice.