India: Research Overview, National University of Educational Planning and Administration, Delhi

The CREATE community and school study in India (CoMSS) covered 90 schools and 6,431 households from 36 villages selected from four blocks of three different districts namely Rajnandgaon district of Chhattisgarh and Rewa and Dindori districts of Madhya Pradesh. These villages were the focus of an earlier study in 1990 (Govinda and Varghese, 1993). In all over 9,000 children were identified in the study areas who were enrolled in the case study schools.

Basic school ‘roster data’ on children including their name, age, caste, grade, father’s name, residence, presence in school on the day of the visit, attendance in last month, and performance according to teacher’s perception was collected in three rounds (2007, 2008 and 2009). In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with cluster resource coordinators (who are recruited to provide academic support to teachers at school level) and also with community members and parents. The school survey also included competency tests with Grade 4 and 5 children in Hindi and mathematics for which test papers were developed at NUEPA. Around 2,000 children took these tests.

Some Findings

All the case study areas have shown considerable progress in educational access and enrolment rates are much greater than in 1990, especially in the most deprived areas. The number of primary schools has increased from 35 to 88. However, absenteeism is a serious problem. The proportion of children absent for four or more days in month (about 20% of learning time) varied from about 12% in the best district to 25% in the worst. The most frequent reason given for absence was illness, with domestic chores and work being given as the next most common reason. Many children thus miss school days, repeat grades and finally drop out from school in a vicious cycle of deprivation and disadvantage (Bandyopadhyay, Das and Zeitlyn, 2011).

The incidence of repetition in all three research clusters is high. In two of them about one fifth children were found to have repeated their class at least once since they entered school. Repetition was much more common in government run formal or Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS) schools and very few were in private schools. The proportion of over age pupils in each of the three clusters was also striking. Those who are one year overage or more account for between 40% and 70% of all students in Grade 5. Those two years over age or more account for between 16% and 49% in the respective clusters. By Grade 8 between 25% and 50% are over age by at least two years. In Grade 1 between 30% and 40% are one year over age and 6% to 12% are two years over. This suggests that the problem of over age is both due to late entry and to repetition in higher grades. Children who are over age are at risk of drop out and may not reach the end of elementary school until they are well over 16 years old. Making children repeat the same grade may de-motivate them, causing early dropout. It certainly increases problems associated with being over age in grade (Govinda and Bandyopadhyay, 2010b).

The incidence of drop out appears to be between 5% and 10% a year across the clusters and was greater in 2010 than 2009. There was not much difference in dropout rates of boys and girls. Overall between 20% and 35% fail to complete Grade 5 in the case study clusters. About 11% of children in the CREATE household survey did not go to school. For some the reason was given was the unfavourable location and distance needed to travel to the nearest school. Children from poor households were more likely not to attend. The most frequent reasons given were household work (20%) working for income (11%), and the costs of going to school (5%) (Govinda and Bandyopadhyay, 2010b). Other data indicated that the combination of inflexible unfriendly schools, disinterested, demoralised teachers and poor facilities pushes some students out of school, and that supply side factors are an important in determining dropout and absenteeism (Reddy and Sinha, 2010). Children from households with little or no previous educational experience are more likely to be excluded from schooling. Many first generation learners live in environments that do not encourage them to learn and continue their education. 38% of students were first generation learners in the case study villages (Govinda and Bandyopadhyay, 2010b).

Girls from poor, SC, ST and Muslim communities tend to be more disadvantaged than their male counterparts and a larger proportion of girls rather than boys from these groups were not attending school. Girls from disadvantaged groups are more likely to attend government and EGS schools, and more boys attended private schools which often provide have better infrastructure and are thought to provide higher quality education (Bandyopadhyay and Subramaniam, 2008; Bandyopadhyay, 2011). More than half of the parents of girls who never attend school were of the opinion that they do not need to send their girl children to school. The reality of girls’ exclusion is further complicated by caste, religion, ethnicity and age.

Programmes have been instituted to help traditionally disadvantaged groups (SC, ST, OBC) to attend school. 88% of Scheduled Caste, 79% of Scheduled Tribe and 95% of Other Backward Class children are going to school in the case study areas. However, educational access and retention remains unsatisfactory. 43% of ST and 44% of OBC students are recorded to have dropped out before completion. In recent years Muslim children have been identified as having unusually low levels of access (Sedwal and Kamat, 2008; Govinda and Bandyopadhyay, 2010b).

Amongst those who completed Grade 5 the transition rate into upper primary was between 89% and 62% across the three clusters (Govinda and Bandyopadhyay, 2010b). In Uttar Pradesh the increased cost of secondary schooling appears to be the most consistently significant factor affecting transition to secondary school, while distance also played a role (Siddhu, 2010).

The results of competency test conducted under CREATE to assess the learning level of children of 4th and 5th grades revealed that there were large numbers of children who did not have mastery over language and arithmetic. Only 12% of children passed the tests at qualifying level in the lowest scoring cluster. About a quarter of Grade 4 children failed to score any marks on the mathematics test in one of the clusters. The competency tests did show that the learning level of children in Grade 5 is higher than in Grade 4 and demonstrated that one additional year of attending school did make a difference in the average learning level of children. However overall there was clear evidence of generally low levels of achievement well below expectations for the grade.

Another major concern is the subject mastery of teachers. Around one fourth of teachers find it difficult to teach any subject taught in school while one out of 12 teachers including a few with post graduate qualifications feel they are not competent enough to teach the subject that they have been assigned to teach. This is a disturbing situation in the context of the silent exclusion that is attributed to absenteeism, poor learning level, and the high repetition and drop out prevailing in these three clusters (Bandyopadhyay, Umabati and Zeitlyn, 2011).

Teacher management is an important issue in those clusters where there is a wide range of Pupil Teacher Ratios (PTR) between schools. There are extreme variations. One of the case study schools has seven teachers though it has only 11 students. Other schools have only one or two teachers and PTRs of over 70:1.

Many of the schools in the case study area are small with fewer than 100 children. The problems of small, single teacher schools with multi age and multi grade classes are accentuated by the shortages of qualified and trained teachers (Blum and Diwan, 2007; Blum, 2009). The largest numbers of the under-qualified and untrained teachers are found in the most rural districts. While small community based schools help enrolment, there is some concern that many small schools have low standards and limit the chance for meaningful learning (Govinda and Bandyopadhyay, 2010b).

Not a single government primary school in the tribal cluster of Dindori has a toilet. In the second cluster 60% of schools do not have toilets, and in the third 27%. Many also do not have clean drinking water available (Govinda and Bandyopadhyay, 2010b).

Some Policy Messages

  • Many young children are denied access to early childhood care and education (zone 0). Many of these children suffer from malnutrition and undernutrition. Children in MP and Chhattisgarh are facing malnutrition and undernutrition as revealed the recent NFHS data (Sood, 2010). The states need to give more attention to improving the services provided by ICDS that run Anganwaris which are attended by the majority of poor and disadvantaged children, particularly girls (Bandyopadhyay and Behera, 2010).
  • Following the recommendations of RTE Act, each school needs to draw up its plan and budget the activities for its further improvement involving local people and local government agencies. This needs to be prioritised and has to be part of policy of local governing bodies including Panchayati Raj Institutes (Govinda and Bandyopadhyay, 2010a; Bandyopadhyay and Dey, 2011).
  • The analysis highlights the need for policy initiatives with respect to recruitment of teachers and upgrading their capacity. The analysis also identifies many single or two teacher schools, and these need multi-grade teaching approaches. The fieldwork indicates that many teachers, despite increasing levels of qualification, have difficulties dealing with multi-grade system classrooms and schools. The professional development of teachers needs more attention and they should also be encouraged to receive further education to improve their subject knowledge.
  • There is a need for a database on the status of teachers at the school level to aid teacher deployment. Extreme values of PTR should be addressed and all schools staffed at similar levels of 30-35:1.
  • The low motivation of teachers to serve in remote rural areas needs to be addressed so that more rational and equitable deployment of teachers can be achieved. Levels of teachers’ morale are central to attempts to improve learning – teachers need to be supported and encouraged to teach in poor rural areas.
  • Remedial teaching needs to be developed and introduced especially where there is high absenteeism and repetition. It is very important that schools and communities take action within the school to encourage regular attendance of children and monitor their learning level.
  • Provision of free nutritional meals and health care facilities in school protects children from poor nutrition and ill health which are associated with low attendance and poor learning levels.
  • Policy makers need to pay attention to the availability of improved physical facilities along with provision for improving teacher supply and deployment, and teacher attendance, across the states.
  • It is important to implement the ‘no detention’ policy and ensure progression at the right age for the grade. This needs links to continuous and comprehensive evaluation of learning with diagnostic characteristics. Too many children are over age for their grade and may not complete schooling.
  • Better developed areas are served by private providers and government schools, whereas poorer underdeveloped areas have the worst facilities and teachers. As a result of this, despite being enrolled in school, children living in remote areas are denied meaningful access. Priority provision of quality schooling facilities by the government to poor areas may break the nexus between location, social inequality, gender and poverty that together cause exclusion of children from schooling. Private schools do not provide access to the poor (Härmä, 2010).