What the National Policy on Education should ideally incorporate?

There was a time when successive governments of India would set aside time and efforts to set out 5 year developmental models for the economy. This has however been replaced today by Niti Aayog. So when there was such an importance placed on the overall development of the economy and the associated sectors why wasn’t there such seriousness for the education sector? After all a robust and well functioning education sector will feed the industry with well trained and capable manpower?

So it comes as a massive surprise that the previous National Policy on Education was formulated in 1986 and only now is the government readying the latest NEP. Speaking at the National Stocktaking Convention on the Right to Education (RTE) Act recently, vice-president Hamid Ansari quoted the findings of the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER, 2014) that about 50% Class V children in rural India were unable to read a simple paragraph or do basic math. He also shared a crucial observation that while enrolment in elementary education has increased in terms of absolute numbers, education outcomes have declined among children aged 6 to 14 years.

It is a good sign that the HRD ministry is well aware of chronically low learning levels and has cited it in the New Education Policy (NEP). So what does the NEP need to do to ensure that children learn basic language and numerical skills? Can technology be leveraged to provide better school education? What level of teacher performance assessments are needed bring in more accountability?

While none of these questions are new, what’s novel is that the HRD ministry has for the first time turned to extensive grassroots consultations for solutions. In fact, randomized impact evaluations conducted by researchers affiliated with Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) has thrown up insights on what works and what doesn’t in improving the learning outcomes of children, which can help build a evidence-backed NEP.  The research clearly sets out 3 areas of improvement.

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Pedagogical solutions

It is proven that pedagogical interventions aimed at the learning level of the child have yielded unexpectedly good results. Universally, every classroom across the world has a wide variation in learning levels among students. 15 years of randomized impact evaluations carried out in India, Ghana and Kenya has shown that populating classes based on learning levels, in place of the current practice of grouping according to age or grade, can help children gain basic maths and reading skills quickly.

In fact, Indian NGO Pratham has been doing path-breaking research on this topic. It’s Read India programme based on teaching-at-the-right-level approach have shown positive impacts on learning. A recent evaluation of this programme implemented in a government school classroom in rural Haryana showed that, schoolteachers, with monitoring and mentoring support from block officials and Pratham staff, reflected improvements in basic Hindi skills. This has provided with an evidence-backed scalable model for raising the bar of basic literacy and arithmetic skills that can be implemented by government schoolteachers in a government school context.

Technological Solutions

While forming classes on the basis of learning levels and competencies may pose some logistical challenges. Technology has the inherent flexibility to adapt to the level of understanding of the child to teach basic competencies in reading and arithmetic even when attending the same classroom. An experiment conducted in Gujarat where children were allowed to play self-paced math games showed exponential improvements in their math scores. However, in another part of the world, a ‘One Laptop One Child’ in Peru showed that technology alone cannot guarantee learning.

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School governance

In addition to pedagogy and introduction of technology, school governance factors also contribute to improving learning levels. Studies conducted by J-PAL affiliated researchers show that when teacher are incentivized on basis of their presence and effort, and establishing a well designed monitoring and accountability structures, can lead to improvements in learning in certain contexts.

In fact this has already been proven in primary schools run by the NGO Seva Mandir in rural Udaipur. When teacher’s attendance was monitored and their salaries linked to their attendance it was found that it improved student test scores. Government schools in rural Andhra Pradesh that linked their teachers’ pay with the students test scores also led to test score gains.

However, an incentive structure tied to student learning outcomes, may be detrimental for the students in the long run as the teachers may “teach to the test”, and as witnessed in Kenya may raise test scores in the short-term.

Acknowledging the importance of community participation, India’s RTE Act mandates the formation of school management committees, but the effectiveness of community monitoring is mixed. A study in rural UP saw that when Village Education Committees simply reported about the quality of government schools in their village it did not improve education outcomes. However, this approach may yield better results if the school management committees were empowered to oversee recruitment of teachers as well as monitor them on learning outcomes children.

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Overall, the research concludes that well-thought out reforms in pedagogy and school governance structures are critical to address India’s learning predicament. Going ahead, as new solutions emerge, it will be important to continually evaluate and validate, lessons learnt from them before incorporating them in the national policies.