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Hunger / HDI | Education
Education

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The recent policy documents, including the NIPUN Bharat guidelines (2021), highlight the importance of developing Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) skills to ensure future success. In simple terms, FLN refers to basic reading, writing, and mathematics skills.

If learning in the foundational years encompassing three years of preschool followed by two years of grade 1 and 2 is not done well, it often leads to children falling behind, unable to ever catch up, even if supported by the so called ‘remediation programmers’. It acts as the base upon which all future learning is built. It’s relevance in improving not just the future learning capacities but also influencing economic, social and developmental factors over long term have been established beyond doubt. 

Sadly, the state of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy in India is dismal with data from ASER surveys, National Achievement Surveys (NAS) showing poor literacy and numeracy skills across grades. What is worrisome is also that the performance of children is not just low, it is seen to be falling over the last few years. In addition to this, there also exists wide variations across the country with some states like Kerala, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana clearly outperforming states like Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand. Lack of focus on quality of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy and ultimately leads to generations of children unable to become productive citizens of the economy, leading to massive economic and social losses.

There are issues that make it difficult to achieve quality learning, some of which include poor quality teaching in anganwadis, and primary grades that is partially supported by obsolete curriculum and textbooks in addition to a multilingual reality that we are unequipped to handle. Besides, low quality teacher professional development, lack of monitoring and support and inadequate research further leads to a complex cycle of low expectations, poor implementation and low quality of real teaching learning in the classroom.

India needs a futuristic approach to ensure universal access to quality levels and equity for all pre-primary and primary education children. The Index on Foundational Literacy and Numeracy is a first step in the same direction, establishing an understanding of the overall state of Foundational Learning across children aged below ten years in Indian States and Union territories. It provides 41 different indicators across five key domains: Educational Infrastructure, Access to Education, Basic Health, Learning outcomes and Governance. The methodology adopted to assign weights in the index is Principal component analysis (PCA) . 

The key findings of the report titled State of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy in India (released on 16th December, 2021), which has been prepared by Institute for Competitiveness in association with Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM), are as follows (please click here and here to access): 

• The top-scoring regions are Kerala (67.95) and West Bengal (58.95) in Small and Large states, respectively. Lakshadweep (52.69) and Mizoram (51.64) are top-scoring regions in Union Territory and Northeast state category

• Out of the five pillars, it has been observed that states have performed particularly worse in Governance. More than 50 percent of the states have scored below the national average, i.e. 28.05, the lowest across all pillars. These pillar-wise analyses will help states assess the state of the budgetary measures and steps needed to improve the status of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy identify existing gaps that obstruct their growth.

• There is a huge gap between Kerala and the rest of the Indian States in the Index on Foundational Literacy and Numeracy scores. This vast variation is observed in the Learning outcomes and Educational Infrastructure, which necessitates immediate attention for the rest of the country.

• The challenge of access to education is a component that requires immediate attention within the states. The large states like Rajasthan (25.67), Gujarat (22.28) and Bihar (18.23) notably lags on this front, whereas the north-eastern states show the highest scores due to their better performance. 

• Best practices can be adopted from the highest-scoring states/ UTs. Kerala, West Bengal and Himachal Pradesh to further develop policy reforms to improve in those areas where the state of education has scope for improvement.

• Some states may serve as role models for others in certain aspects, but they too need to learn from other districts while tackling their challenges. This holds not only for high performers but also for low performing states. For instance, while Kerala has the best performance in the small state, it can also learn from some lower-scoring regions, such as Andhra Pradesh (38.50), which outperforms Kerala (36.55) with respect to access to education. 

• The indicators are assigned weights after being categorized under specific heads used to make the index more robust. For calculating the weights of indicators within a component, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has been used. Parameters were then run through PCA to check for a fit between the indicators. 

• The percentage of GDP that goes into education needs to be increased on an urgent basis. The current chunk is 3.1 percent. This needs to at least be doubled or more to ensure the wide-scale establishment of necessary prerequisites and implementation of ‘quality’ Foundational Literacy and Numeracy across the continuum. 

• Efforts would need to be made to ensure basic infrastructural facilities for a child – including drinking water and sanitation facilities as well as healthy nutritious food. Additionally, adequate internet facilities and basic tech resources need to be provided in all the schools to ensure access and use of the newer digital learning opportunities, along with offline reading materials and libraries. These form the backbone of all efforts directed towards the achievement of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy. 

• Since nutrition and education are both equally important and require significant time and effort, it may be worthwhile to consider having two anganwadi workers--AWWs per anganwadi. While one of them may be trained and specialised in the health component, including providing supplementary nutrition, the other can focus on ensuring non-formal education to children. (N. Vinayak, 2015). 

• The report highlights the role of well-planned early interventions like the National Education Policy (2020) and the NIPUN Bharat guidelines, leading to long-term improved learning outcomes. 

• Research indicates that 90 percent of a child’s brain development happens by five years of age. Hence, focus on early education years becomes one of the most important indicators of productive and efficient human capital. 

• In the schooling system, Foundational Literacy and Numeracy refers to education of a child between 3-8 years of age. This essentially includes the initial three years of pre school, followed by early primary education up to grade 2, as per the National Education Policy (NEP 2020). However, the NIPUN Bharat guidelines for implementation of NEP talks of four foundational years, namely one year of pre school plus formal schooling up to grade 3. 

• In simple terms Foundational Literacy refers to the ability to read and understand an age appropriate text. However, it is critical to understand what it really means and entails.

• The NIPUN Bharat guidelines talk of nine key skills to be focused on for Foundational Literacy. They are: 1. Oral Language Development; 2. Phonological Awareness; 3. Decoding; 4. Concept About Print; 5. Writing; 6. Culture of Reading; 7. Vocabulary; 8. Reading Comprehension; and 9. Reading Fluency. 

• Foundational Numeracy means the ability to reason and to apply simple numerical concepts in every day problem solving situations, as per the NIPUN Bharat guidelines 2021.

• The NIPUN Bharat guidelines talk of five key skills to be focused on for Foundational Numeracy. They are: 1. Pre Math Concept; 2. Numbers and Operations; 3. Measurement; 4. Geometry; and 5. Patterns.

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