Annual Status of Education Report 2021

Author : Pratham

Link to PDF

Year : 2021

What is ASER

The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) is a citizen-led household survey that provides nationally representative estimates of children’s schooling status and their foundational reading and arithmetic skills. In its standard format, the survey reaches children in the age group of 3-16 in almost all rural districts of India. It is carried out each year by volunteers from partner organisations like colleges, universities, non-profit organisations, and teacher training institutes, among others.
For this year, the survey was done via phone calls (by 3,000 volunteers) to teachers and parents.

Survey Coverage

Survey Focus

The key trends explored in the report are:

• Enrolment rates and patterns
• Paid tuition classes
• Smartphones (access and usage)
• Learning support at home
• Access to learning material
• Challenges of remote learning

Survey Sampling

ASER 2021 has a three-stage clustered design. In the first stage 30 villages are sampled from each rural district in the Census 2011 village directory using Probability Proportional to Size. In the second stage, 20 households are randomly selected from each of the sampled villages. And, in the third stage, 14 households with mobile phones are sampled from the 20 selected households in each of the 30 sampled villages in each rural district. In each household selected in the third stage, parents are asked about all children in the age group of 5-16 years resident in the household.

Key Findings

• Clear shift in enrolment from private to government schools. The trend is likely because the pandemic led to lower incomes/job loss and migrant workers having to return home. Thus, the shift might have more to do with lower affordability, rather than improving standards of government education.
  In the north east, and east, we see that government school enrolment rates have dropped, not increased. Alarmingly, private school enrolment rates haven’t gone up there, but rather this seems to derive from increased dropout rates.
• By all metrics and cuts, the percentage of students attending tuitions are increasing. This could be a result of a number of candidate reasons. Perhaps lower engagement and learning in an online format prompted a higher demand for tuition. Perhaps the shift from private school to government schooling necessitated additional support (and tuition classes were sufficiently cost effective). Perhaps this is an independent trend, relating to increasing competitiveness of the education sector.
• Smartphone ownership has increased. However, children don’t necessarily have access to smartphones.
  Smartphone ownership (>=1/household) is up to 67.6%. But even in >25% of these households children have no access to these smartphones for their education. A large contributing factor to the increase in smartphone penetration has been the purchase of a smartphone for the purpose of the child’s education. >25% of all households have bought a new smartphone for this purpose.
• Learning support provided at home has decreased over another year of the pandemic.
  The main reason for the same seems to be the reopening of schools (which correlates with the decrease in support at home). It is also possible that this would have in any case been saturated and reduced. It is also noteworthy that the decrease in support largely stems from fathers, who presumably have returned to migrant work in larger numbers than mothers (given the gender skewed work landscape in rural India). In general students enrolled in private schools and those with more educated parents receive significantly more learning support at home (10% to 35% more households).
• There is an increase the learning materials being made available to children. Interestingly, government schools outperform private schools on this front. Unsurprisingly, a higher percentage of schools which have been reopened have provided children with some learning activity for the given reference week.
  WhatsApp is the most preferred medium of sharing at home learning activities. Even in schools which have been reopened, whatsapp based activity sharing is almost as prevalent as traditional homework.
• Around 68% of schools have reopened physically, with the number being slightly higher for private schools. In these schools, 95% of students are now attending physical classes.
• The percentage of children who are not enrolled in school went up in lower grades, but has dropped in higher grades. It is possible that many parents deferred enrolment of younger children till schools opened physically. The gender gap in enrolment has been nearly bridged. However, on the whole, the non enrolment rate has gone up to 5%.
  Despite this, there is a net increase in enrolment across most schools (at least perceived). This might be due to a still growing young population in India.
• Textbooks and worksheets remain the principal form of at home learning engagement. However, usage of videos and online classes has increased. Even in schools which have reopened, the usage of videos and online classes persists. The home environment has a great impact on at home learning and engagement. The parents’ education level seems to have a strong impact on the same.
• People seem to be adapting to an online mode of learning. ~50% of students claim that they are finding online learning activities easier than they used to find them. Only 30% of them report difficulty in studying at home (although this question inherently contains self reporting bias). Of the challenges reported, most of them seem to be infrastructural issues, which should improve over time, even if they are bad right now.
• The pandemic years have a dampening effect on learning outcomes. Only ~70% of classrooms are able to cover the regular curriculum, with only ~40% including extracurricular activities, and ~50% having to revise the previous year’s curriculum. Further, some of the issues faced by teachers are in the table below.
• While adoption of the mid-day meal scheme is not very strong, providing funds/rations to school children seems to play a major role in rural education penetration.