Focus: GS II: Education
Why in News?
The ASER Report 2022 released recently revealed that almost all (98.4%) students in the age bracket of 6-14 years are now enrolled in schools.
ASER Survey:
- A citizen-led household survey that provides estimates of the enrolment status and basic reading and arithmetic levels of children aged 3-16 at the national, state, and district level.
- Conducted by NGO Pratham every year since 2005.
- Reaches children in the age group of 3-16 in almost all rural districts of India.
- Uses household rather than school-based sampling.
Highlights of ASER 2022:
- In ASER 2022 Survey, 7 lakh candidates from 19,060 schools in 616 districts were surveyed to calculate the learning outcomes post-pandemic on school children.
- Enrollment has gone from 97.2 per cent in 2018 to 98.4 per cent in 2022.
- As many as 72.9 per cent of the surveyed students go to government schools.
- In only three states, the number of girls not going to school is above 10% – Madhya Pradesh (17%), Uttar Pradesh (15%), and Chhattisgarh (11.2%).
- Nationally, children’s basic reading ability has dropped to pre-2012 levels, reversing the slow improvement achieved in the intervening years.
- In both government and private schools, only 20.5% students of Class 3 can read, compared to 27.3% in 2018.
- The proportion of Class 5 students who can read has dropped to 42.8% in 2022, compared to 50.5% in 2018.
