Learning Levels Seen Restoring to Pre-COVID Levels

In the first sign of recovery from the slump of the Covid pandemic, reading and arithmetic levels for children between the ages of 6 and 14 years have improved across states, with government schools leading the way. According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024 released on Tuesday, basic reading levels for Class 3 children enrolled in government schools have been the highest since the survey began 20 years ago.

The number of Class 3 children who can read a Class 2 textbook in government schools stands at 23.4%, up from 16.3% in 2022 and 20.9% in the pre-pandemic year of 2018. Overall reading levels, across both government and private schools, too improved from 20.5% in 2022 to 27.1% in 2024, almost touching the pre-pandemic level of 27.3%.

Arithmetic levels, too,  improved across both government and private schools — from 28.2% Class 3 children who could do at least subtraction in 2018 to 33.7% in 2024, recovering sharply from the slump of 25.9% in 2022.

The report points out that while almost all states (barring J&K and Nagaland) have shown a recovery in learning levels of Class 3 students when compared to 2022, the year children came back to school after the pandemic, states such as Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh showed a 10-percentage point increase in reading levels in 2024 when compared to 2022.

Other states have also seen big gains when compared to 2018. Bihar saw a jump of almost 8 percentage points in Class 3 reading levels to 20.1% in 2024, while Uttarakhand recorded a sharp rise, from 24.7% in 2018 to 35.6% in 2024. Bihar also saw improvements in Class 3 arithmetic — from 18% in 2018 to 28.2% in 2024.

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