‘Teaching cannot be business as usual once schools reopen’

The shutdown of schools since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic last year has posed serious concerns about children’s learning as well as their social and mental well-being. Experts are convinced that India’s learning poverty (the World Bank definition is children unable to read and understand simple text and numbers by 10), which was at an alarming 54.8 per cent pre-pandemic, would have shot up. BIKKRAMA DAULET SINGH, co-managing director of the non-profit Central Square Foundation, spoke to Anjuli Bhargava on the educational fallout of the pandemic, the relevance of the National Education Policy (NEP), and how to make Nipun (National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy) work in the present context. Excerpts: By the time Nipun was operationalised last month, the base year had altered with a drastically different education scenario. What is the relevance of Nipun and the NEP in an environment where at least two cohorts of learners (grades 1 and 2) have missed out completely after the Covid-19 pandemic struck?

Nipun, above all, still helps all states recognise the problem: what is learning poverty and why is it important? Half our children at age 10 cannot read in Hindi, English or regional languages. I think Nipun sends the message that we need to tackle this not-so-trivial problem in a mission-oriented manner.

Second, 80-90 per cent of state education budgets go towards paying salaries. Programmes that focus on quality are usually centrally funded. The ministry has put aside ~2,700 crore a year for foundational learning over the next few years. A robust FLN (foundational literacy and numeracy) programme requires around ~500 per child per year (remember you are not paying for the teachers through this).

The big challenge is that it is not status quo. It may work for the new cohorts in grades 1 and 2 but what happens to the children at the primary level who have lost two years of learning? We’ve been trying to drive home the point that a 6090-day remediation is not going to work. You can’t crunch two years of learning into two or three months. Already surveys in the states we work in are showing that there are large cohorts who cannot recognise the alphabet or numbers. We are suggesting schools “start early and end late”. This means that teachers need to devise a new set of worksheets and curriculum for a grade 3 student that actually begins with grade 1 level work.

For instance, Tamil Nadu has taken the bull by the horns by introducing level aligned textbooks.

It is not giving teachers a choice, but changing the textbook itself.

Second, the pandemic has demonstrated that home learning can actually help bridge the gap. The Language and Learning foundation (LLF) in Kurukshetra, Haryana, called “har ghar school” used volunteers who twice a week went to the communities and took classes, distributed worksheets both physically and through Whatsapp groups. It worked quite well. Uttar Pradesh is looking to extend this across the state, but through teachers since mobiling so many volunteers may not be possible.

But the NGO and civil society initiatives can only show the way. They can’t solve the problem at a systemic level in a country with such scale.

Yes, teachers at a macro level need to teach material that is rolled back by two years. It cannot be business as usual once schools reopen. The teacher needs to alter behaviour and do flexible, iterative work. We are suggesting that critical components be emphasised and taught. So if it’s a child in Class 3, it’s critical that she can read sentences of a certain length or, say, add numbers. So remediation classes are centred on those.

For this, the teachers have to come on board as they are simply conditioned to teach grade-level textbooks. One can expect a pushback from teachers as has been seen in the past with new innovative teaching experiments. So only those states that can mobilise teachers around this national crisis will succeed. In short, Nipun can really help the new cohorts coming in but for the existing ones it will help in fits and starts.

Which of the Ngo-led initiatives have really made a difference?

The hope with all these is that they switch from civil society to system-led programmes. Even if the NGO or civil society organisation does the technical or ground work, it should have the state government’s buy-in. I think Rocket Learning, LLF and Saarthi all have strong programmes that have demonstrated some degree of success with engagement levels and behavioural changes. Whether they can be adopted by the state governments at a systemic level remains to be seen.

I do think this should be made into a kind of movement on the lines of a Swachh Bharat mission — one that exhorts teachers and nudges them to ensure they don’t leave large cohorts of children behind. The pandemic has posed a very real threat of a lost generation of learners. If this can be prioritised at the prime ministerial level, it would grab national attention and minimise some of the losses.