More

    India’s National Education Policy Attempts to Address Poor Learning Outcomes

    EducationEducation policyIndia’s National Education Policy Attempts to Address Poor Learning...
    - Advertisment -

    India’s National Education Policy Attempts to Address Poor Learning Outcomes

    While India has made significant progress towards achieving universal education, learning outcomes remain low. The 2020 National Education Policy (NEP) aims to address this by tackling quality discrepancies in education across all learning stages and improving teacher support and development.

    By Yifei Yan

    Unlike some of its neighbours, India has long neglected its primary and secondary education sector. While progress has been made towards achieving universal education since the 1990s as the neglect was substantially remedied, learning outcomes still remain poor and quite uneven between government and private schools as well as across different states and regions and socioeconomic circumstances.

    For example, even in as late as 2018, nearly half of Standard V students in rural areas cannot read Standard II-level materials, and less than one-third can do basic division. Education quality and equity is further hindered by issues like teacher absenteeism and a rigid curriculum that prioritises rote learning and benefits students with higher academic achievement.

    Given how widespread and multifaceted these problems are, their solutions need a comprehensive and systematic approach. The Indian Government’s National Education Policy (NEP), launched in 2020, offers refreshing ideas, particularly in terms of integrating different stages of schooling and supporting key stakeholders, to achieve educational improvements.

    More than three years since its release, the NEP’s ambitious policy prescriptions are gradually reaching the Indian schools on the ground. But analytical, operational and political gaps must also be addressed for the NEP’s vision to be realised fully.

    - Advertisement -

    Compared to its predecessor, which was issued more than three decades ago, the NEP makes more coherent connections among different stages of school education, with children now taught across four schooling levels — foundational, preparatory, middle and secondary. Within this new structure, the preschool level is embraced as an integral component of foundational education — reflecting the importance of early personal development for a child’s schooling journey. This more-integrated schooling structure is expected to better facilitate the coordination of policies for specific schooling stages to ensure that graduates from the previous stage are ready for the next.

    Another feature of the NEP is the recognition that ‘no stage [of school education] will be considered more important than any other’. Important as this recognition is, it is unconventional, especially given India’s long-prevailing ‘vertical’ career path for teachers, where promotion means being ‘upgraded’ from teaching in primary schools to teaching in secondary and senior secondary schools.

    Complementing this broad vision, the NEP highlights that ‘all stages of school education will require the highest-quality teachers’. It specifies how teachers shall be supported in terms of their service environment, working conditions, professional development and career progression.

    While this vision reflects growing international acknowledgement of the importance of empowered and effective workforces, it is unusual in India, where bureaucracies and public servants are often blamed for poor public service delivery. As negative perceptions of teachers are particularly shaped and strengthened by teacher absenteeism, policies usually seek to tighten teacher accountability through the introduction of contract teacherscheck-in cameras and schoolmonitoring.

    The NEP is similarly committed to supporting students across their entire schooling. While the need to ensure universal access continues to be underscored, the NEP has also attached great importance to foundational literacy and numeracy skills. This aims to tackle widely reported learning deficits.

    These ambitions for improving student learning outcomes are put forward without neglecting or compromising students’ learning experiences. Instead, the policy has set out multiple paths for a diverse, flexible and inclusive curriculum to enable the holistic development of students. The National Curriculum Framework for School Education, released in August 2023, is expected to be an essential tool for standardisation and benchmarking. Yet, the NEP has also created space for the curriculum to cater to local contexts and frontline curriculum needs.

    Despite this and other positive developments at the federal level, the NEP’s implementation has faced intense resistance from states such as KarnatakaTamil Nadu and Bihar. In other words, though there is strong political commitment at the top, the ability to communicate and coordinate with state governments has fallen short.

    The NEP’s controversial reception at the state level is not only an issue of political capacity, it also reflects a deficit in policymakers’ operational capacity. Apart from expecting states to assume responsibility for tasks ranging from curriculum development to teacher support, little clarification is provided in the NEP on the resources and support that state governments can expect from the central government to help them effectively carry out these functions.

    The NEP is also troublingly vague on the design of policy instruments that will encourage a shift away from ‘vertical’ teaching career paths, achieve learner-centred and curiosity-driven pedagogy or facilitate sharing of best practices between public and private schools.

    These deficits point to an urgent and more fundamental need for both central and state governments to fill in the gaps regarding their analytical capacity. For instance, the usefulness and relevance of national-level datasets for policymaking have been hampered by discrepancies in definitions and estimation methodologies. At the state level, research has also highlighted how the official data on standardised assessments can overestimate the levels of student learning.

    Such shortfalls in data, if left unrectified, will make it difficult to advance the NEP’s policy goals. Similarly, to support the launch of a tailored curriculum, policy makers and education officials must also improve their capacity to determine the current status and identify gaps in teacher recruitment and preparation for new subjects.

    Without corresponding policy efforts to address these gaps and strengthen capacity, a solution that is lauded as having great promise for making India ‘a global knowledge superpower’ risks falling short of expectations.

    Yifei Yan is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Public Administration and Public Policy at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. She is also the author of  Getting schools to work better: Educational accountability and teacher support in India and China.

    This piece has been sourced from the East Asia Forum of the Australian National University

    Image: Wikipedia

    - Advertisement -

    LEAVE A REPLY

    Please enter your comment!
    Please enter your name here

    Latest news

    Toxic Air Threatens Children’s Lives Across East Asia and the Pacific, UNICEF Warns

    Nearly half of PM2.5 pollution in the worst-affected countries comes from the burning of fossil fuels, biomass, and agricultural waste – also major contributors to climate change. As extreme weather events worsen due to climate change, air pollution is expected to become an even greater threat, UNICEF warned.

    Imperialism (Still) Rules

    The 1910s and 1920s debates between the Second and Third Internationals of Social Democrats and allied movements in Europe and beyond involved contrasting positions on WW1 and imperialism.

    World-Class Education Key to Making India a Developed Nation by 2047: NITI Aayog

    The report is based on extensive discussions with state government officials from over 20 states and union territories, vice-chancellors and senior academics from 50 SPUs, and chairpersons of several state higher education councils.

    Google’s Willingness to Develop AI for Weapons Raises Concerns: Human Rights Watch

    Google’s revised Artificial Intelligence (AI) policy signals a worrying shift in the company’s stance on the development of AI for military applications, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has warned.
    - Advertisement -

    In the Lok Sabha: Government Committed to Addressing Climate Change, Says Minister

    The Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change (MoEFCC) has launched several schemes targeting pollution control, afforestation, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable resource management.

    Closing in on an End to Plastic Pollution

    We need to think innovatively regarding chemicals of concern, taking inspiration from existing agreements that protect us from harmful chemicals.

    Must read

    Toxic Air Threatens Children’s Lives Across East Asia and the Pacific, UNICEF Warns

    Nearly half of PM2.5 pollution in the worst-affected countries comes from the burning of fossil fuels, biomass, and agricultural waste – also major contributors to climate change. As extreme weather events worsen due to climate change, air pollution is expected to become an even greater threat, UNICEF warned.

    Imperialism (Still) Rules

    The 1910s and 1920s debates between the Second and Third Internationals of Social Democrats and allied movements in Europe and beyond involved contrasting positions on WW1 and imperialism.
    - Advertisement -

    More from the sectionRELATED
    Recommended to you