Q. The impact of family and socio-economic factors on the retention and learning of children in schools is known to policymakers. How does the new National Educational Policy (NEP) 2020 address these issues? 

A: There are enabling provisions in the NEP 2020 which may address family and socio-economic disablers of education in India. These include:

1. Universal provisioning of ECE: This, if it can be implemented, it will ensure that all children irrespective of their socioeconomic background can achieve a certain level of cognitive development. This is important because there is clear evidence of the positive impact of ECE on early cognitive development of children and its long-term benefits. 
    
2. National Mission on Foundational Literacy and Numeracy: Given the information that a sizable percent of children who are in school (and those who are outside) lack foundational literacy and numeracy, a mission mode covering these aspects for all children, can be useful. However, this requires a buy-in from the whole education system to ensure that Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) is achieved among all students within a reasonable period.
    
3. Appointment of an adequate number of teachers: This can reduce the pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) and teachers will get time to provide additional academic support to those children who lag in terms of learning achievements. The implementation of this may not be that difficult given the strategy of state governments to appoint more teachers, and also the flow of students to private schools (though the latter is not desirable). Moreover, there is a social demand for the appointment of more teachers in many states as a way of creating more employment (since there is huge unemployment among educated people in the country). 
    
4. Appointment of local teachers familiar with local languages: This may help linguistic minorities like tribal communities. We have seen that the absence of teachers who know the home language of children can be a constraint in the education of children from tribal communities.
    
5. There are also other strategies: The school preparation module before joining class I, the promotion of peer tutoring, and the use of trained volunteers from the community (every literate member of the community could commit to teaching one student/​person how to read). These can help improve the learning achievements of those children who lag due to the lack of adequate academic support at home. 
    
6. There are also non-educational interventions such as strengthening school meal systems, including breakfast, and the provision of regular health check-ups. These can ensure that children have adequate nutrition and are healthy in order to concentrate on their learning. 

Q: What are the specific provisions in NEP 2020 to reduce the dropping out of students?

A: Several provisions are planned for this purpose. For example, there is a focus on the education of girls by providing safe and practical conveyances and/​or hostels. This may be useful to ensure the retention of girls in secondary grades. There are also plans to use tracking and monitoring system to see that all children enrol and move from lower to higher grades. There is also a provision to use counsellors and trained social workers connected to schools, though this can be resource-intensive. Despite all these measures, a section of children may not attend schools, and the expansion of open and distance learning modes is envisaged for them. 

Q: What about the strategies to improve the learning achievements of children? What are the provisions in the NEP 2020 for this purpose?

A: There are strategies proposed for this purpose. These include:

1. Involve community and alumni in volunteering efforts for enhancing learning: This may help children whose parents may not be able to provide academic support at home. It is also based on the realisation that certain kind of academic support outside the school (including at home) is needed to improve learning achievements and that many first-generation school-goers may not get much support from their parents.  
    
2. To close the gap in achievement of learning outcomes, classroom transactions will shift towards competency-based learning and education.
    
3. Wherever possible, the medium of instruction until at least grade V, but preferably till grade VIII and beyond, will be the home language/​local language/​regional language. This may help children like those from tribal communities whose home language is not currently reflected in school education. This provision can justify bilingual education that is prevalent in states such as Odisha.
    
4. High-quality textbooks, including for science, to be made available in the home language. This may be more relevant for teacher training, since higher education in India has English as the formal medium of instruction, though state languages are used informally in many state universities and colleges. 

Q: The problems related to the access to, and quality of education could be different for different social groups, such as the scheduled castes, tribes, religious minorities and girls. There may be a need for specific strategies for each of these groups. What is the response of NEP 2020 in this regard?

A: Yes, there are strategies aimed at specific social groups: 

1. For Scheduled Castes: To continue to address multiple factors, including the lack of access to quality schools, poverty, customs, and language, all of which have had a detrimental effect on rates of enrolment and retention. These are recognised in the policy. 
    
2. For children from tribal communities: Special mechanisms to ensure that children belonging to tribal communities receive the benefits of existing interventions. It could be based on a realisation that even when schemes exist to support them, either they need not be aware of these or may not be able to demand the implementation of such provisions. Internationally, intercultural education is seen as important to address the educational challenges of indigenous groups. However, it is yet to be recognised in India.
    
3. To continue ​‘targeted scholarships, conditional cash transfers to incentivise parents to send their children to school, providing bicycles for transport, etc., that have significantly increased participation of SEDGs¹ in the schooling system in certain areas’. This is the policy matrix that has been conventionally used to increase enrolment and attendance in schools in Indian states, and NEP recognises its benefit. Such conditional transfers are also attempted in Latin American countries, such as Mexico and Brazil. 
    
4. ‘Regions of the country with large populations from educationally-disadvantaged SEDGs should be declared Special Education Zones (SEZs), where all the schemes and policies are implemented to the maximum through additional concerted efforts, to truly change their educational landscape.’ This may be targeted at districts which have a higher share of less-privileged groups, such as tribal communities. 
    
5. ‘Gender-Inclusion Fund’ to build the nation’s capacity to provide equitable quality education to all girls as well as transgender students. This may be useful to reduce the dropping out of girls in higher grades. This can address the lack of willingness to spend money on girls’ education on the part of sections of Indian parents but there is a need for reforms in social and family norms also. The persistence of the practice of dowry and patrilocal residence may discourage the willingness to educate girls, and reforms in this regard have enabled changes in practices of gender discrimination (such as sex selection at birth) in other countries, for example, South Korea. 
    
6. Ensuring the inclusion and equal participation of children with disabilities in ECE and the schooling system. This requires substantial investments in infrastructure in all schools and enhancing the availability of adequately trained professionals. 
    
7. Special hostels in dedicated regions, bridge courses, and financial assistance through fee waivers and scholarships to be offered to talented and meritorious students from all SEDGs on a larger scale, especially at the secondary stage of education to facilitate their entry into higher education. Though this model school system has a higher acceptance among people and policy-makers, it should not be seen as adequate to provide quality education to all. Moreover, the use of a much higher level of resources for a few schools may work against the large number of remaining schools.
    
8. Sensitisation of ​‘All participants in the school education system, including teachers, principals, administrators, counsellors, and students’, the notions of inclusion and equity, and the respect, dignity, and privacy of all persons. This is important when we note the persistence of discriminatory practices in classrooms. 
    
9. The school curriculums have, from the beginning, material on human values, such as respect for all persons, empathy, tolerance, human rights, gender equality, non-violence, global citizenship, inclusion, and equity. It would also include more detailed knowledge of various cultures, religions, languages, gender identities, etc., to sensitise and develop respect for diversity. This is closer to the ideal of intercultural education that is recognised as important in the international education discourse. 
   
   There is a higher level of cultural diversity in India. There can be cultural differences between people who live in different regions, follow different religions, and between tribal communities and others, and also between people of different castes. Education and classroom practices in India cannot be called inclusive, and these sustain different kinds of prejudices about ​‘others’. Multiculturalism and intercultural education are not adequately discussed in the context of India and this needs to change. 

Q: What may be the challenges in the implementation of the NEP 2020?

A: Given that many steps which are envisaged in NEP 2020 are yet to be taken up even after 3 – 4 years indicates that its implementation encounters different challenges. The first and foremost challenge is the lack of enough financial resources on the part of state and central governments. The NEP 2020 advocated the use of 6 percent of the country’s GDP on education. However, this may not happen easily for a number of reasons. The tax/​GDP ratio in India is low. Moreover, there is a reluctance on the part of the Central Government to increase the tax rate. The tendency is to give more tax rebates to the middle class. This may reduce the tax/​GDP ratio further. There is an ideology which values lower taxes and expects the demand/​consumption of people to work as a major driver of economic growth. However, such an ideology underplays the importance of public goods and services, such as education and healthcare, in economic and human development. When these public services are not provided adequately, people may have to depend on private providers for education and healthcare. This will reduce the access to education, and also the ability of governments to regulate its quality. India needs to spend more public resources on healthcare also (and this was evident during the COVID crisis), and hence there can be competition for the limitedly available public resources. For all these reasons, I am not expecting the expenditure on education to reach the target that is envisaged in NEP 2020, and this can have a bearing on the pace of implementation of a number of its strategies. 

We may have to note that education is under the concurrent list in the Indian Constitution, and hence state governments also have to play an important role.  The state governments also face severe scarcity of financial resources and hence their ability to invest in education also may not be enough to make all changes that are envisaged in the NEP. Then the willingness and ability of state governments may depend on the local political economy. Though there are adequate resources, these may not be used to enhance the access to and quality of school education for poorer children in certain states; even without enough resources, some state governments may take a lot more actions for this purpose. Hence, it cannot be expected that the provisions of NEP 2020 will be implemented equally well in all states of India. 

Q: What may be the other challenges apart from the availability of financial resources in the implementation of the NEP (2020)?

A: We have discussed in another Q&A note the sudden increase in enrolment in school education after the 1990s. There were not enough trained teachers to meet this demand. Hence, less qualified teachers and higher PTR were common at that period. It could be that learning achievements were worse in the 1990s than in the current times. The majority of people who are part of the education system currently, either as teachers and other functionaries or parents, belong to this cohort of people. The (poorer) quality of education they received will have an impact on the current quality. 

The persistence of poorer learning achievements in Indian schools (wherein more than half of children may not reach the proficiencies expected in each grade) can be a major constraint in improving the quality of education in future. After economic reforms and the boom in the service sector, when many people with higher education got jobs, school teachers may not come from among the brightest who passed out of school. This may have reduced their academic preparedness. The majority of parents even if they have completed school education, may not have adequate proficiency to provide academic support to their children. The impact of these deficiencies may continue to impact India’s public education system for some more decades, even if adequate efforts are made currently. 

One major challenge is in teacher training. The NEP 2020 notes the messy situation of teacher training in the country and suggests major reforms. However, an improvement in this regard may take time even if adequate financial resources are available. There are not enough well-trained teacher-educators in India. The majority of the current generation of teachers are also not well trained and when that is the case, one cannot expect to have many well-trained teacher educators. In one sense, this is also a reflection of the persisting underachievements in terms of learning of a sizeable section of students in Indian schools. Improvements in teacher training, especially, the one which needs to cater to lakhs of teachers will take time. Hence, the quality of education cannot be improved quickly, and it will continue to have an impact on learning achievements, especially for those children whose parents cannot give complementary academic support. 

Q: The provision of additional support to students who face one or other socioeconomic constraints in terms of school education may require a lot more actions on the part of all departments of the government. How can these be initiated? 

A: We have seen the need for volunteers and social workers to improve retention and learning (as there could be disabling family and socioeconomic conditions). The NEP also envisages some of these support schemes. However, it may be difficult to operationalise such schemes in the public education system in all parts of the country. Instead, the governmental system as a whole has to see that socioeconomic vulnerability does not affect the education of children. This should be a concern for health workers (functionaries), local government officials, those who are in charge of the public distribution system or the employment guarantee scheme, organisations which promote self-help groups and micro-enterprises among women, departments for the welfare of scheduled tribes and scheduled castes and so on. There has to be a convergence of public programmes with different social purposes to see that these enable the school education of all children. Non-governmental and civil society organisations can all collaborate in these efforts.

Q: The challenges that a section of children face in terms of access to quality education are more structural. Can these be addressed through a mere policy change?

A: Even structural changes in a democratic society have to take place through governmental policies and actions. However, I agree that a mere description of these desirable changes in a policy statement is not enough. If we look at the past education policies in India, these have also taken note of certain family and socioeconomic conditions which affect the education of children and have suggested a number of steps. Some of these steps were taken by the governments and these had a certain impact on enhancing enrolment and reducing dropout rate. Then there was the adoption of the Right to Education (RTE) Act, which compelled all governmental actors to take necessary steps to provide school education to all. However, there is a persistence of the issues of dropping out and poor learning achievements despite all these efforts. Hence, structural constraints which are not addressed adequately by different governments continue to play an important role. 

In my view, putting down certain desirable changes in policy documents is useful even if these changes do not happen in the near future. This may change the norms related to education in society which can affect governmental and non-governmental actions, and these may make certain changes in the long run. However, this is not to justify the inaction in terms of strategies which are mentioned in policy statements. 

In one sense, implementation and practical actions are more important than policy statements. These have to be taken by multiple (millions of) actors at different levels. Expecting policy change to translate into a change in practices of these millions of actors quickly is not realistic. That is the reason why parents, non-governmental organisations, including philanthropic foundations, civil society activists and parents and communities should interact with the public education system (at different levels) to ensure changes in the practice. Visible improvement in the system will happen only through such an interaction. 

Santhakumar V is a former Professor, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru

Featured photo credit: Purusottam Singh Thakur, Azim Premji Foundation

Primary reading material

National Education Policy (NEP), 2020
https://​www​.edu​ca​tion​.gov​.in/​s​i​t​e​s​/​u​p​l​o​a​d​_​f​i​l​e​s​/​m​h​r​d​/​f​i​l​e​s​/​N​E​P​_​F​i​n​a​l​_​E​n​g​l​i​s​h​_​0.pdf