The Pratham Foundation will release the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) today, January 17, marking the second year since the revival of the crucial national survey involving the state of foundational literacy and numeracy in the country.
Due to the impact of Covid-19, Pratham Foundation’s ASER shifted to a phone-based approach, concentrating on investigating digital inequality and school enrollment levels. However, in 2022, Pratham resumed its field survey, with surveyors visiting various cities across the country for face-to-face interactions with children and teachers in rural India to gauge the state of learning.
In the current year, ASER is concentrating on 14-18 year-olds, offering insights into enrollment patterns, learning levels, and their aspirations. The report also delves into digital access and skills among youth in rural India.
In ASER 2022, approximately 7 lakh candidates from 19,060 schools across 616 districts underwent a survey to assess the learning outcomes of school children in the post-pandemic period. The 2022 report disclosed that nearly all students (98.4 percent) in the age range of 6-14 years are presently enrolled in schools. This figure has improved from 96.6 percent in 2010 to 96.7 percent in 2014 and 97.2 percent in 2018 to 98.4 percent in 2022. Notably, there was a rise of 7.3 percentage points in government school enrollment from 2018 to 2022.
The ASER report noted that the survey covered nine districts, 262 villages, and 4,859 households in Manipur, highlighting that Manipur has the lowest government school enrollment percentage among northeastern states.
Furthermore, 2022 marked the first occasion where the percentage of children currently not enrolled in schools which decreased to 2 percent or below. Despite prolonged school closures during the pandemic period, the proportion of children not enrolled in school continued to decrease between 2018 and 2022.
