With the passing of the Right to Education Act, 2009, the no-detention-policy was introduced for all elementary schools in the country. This meant that the performance of students in Std I-VIII would not be judged on their performance on the basis of an ‘end of the year examination’, and they could not be forced to repeat the same Std. This is also referred to as ‘automatic promotion’.
Almost a decade after the RTE Act came into force, the Parliament, on Wednesday, passed an amendment to repeal the ‘no detention policy’. Now, children in Std V and Std VIII can be detained based on an exam given at the end of the school year.
A lot has happened in this time, and to understand the reasons behind this amendment, we have to look at the challenges faced by the Indian education system and also understand the context in which the ‘no detention policy’ was brought in.
In 2002, with the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), the government made universalization of elementary education a priority. To send all children in the age group of 6-14 to school, policy impetus was on improving school infrastructure and facilities at the primary and upper primary level. The programme did succeed in achieving this goal to a large extent.
According to MHRD data, before SSA came around, for Stds I-VIII, the gross enrolment ratio (GER) stood at 88 in 2000-2001. GER is calculated by dividing the number of students at a given level of education by the population of the age group that should be enrolled at such level. For Stds I-VIII, the corresponding age group is 6-13. Children often get enrolled in school at a later age, which means that a substantial portion of India’s children in the age group of 6-13 was not enrolled in school at the time.
The GER continued to rise gradually, and for 2009-10, it was 103.9. GER being over 100 means that the number of children enrolled in the Stds I-VIII is more than the population of total children in the age group of 6-13. Hence, it is safe to conclude that a good number of children were not enrolled in age-appropriate grades. This happens due to two reasons – when children enter school at an age older than the stipulated age, and when they are held back. Both these situations are not ideal for effective learning.
It is true that quite a few children quit school because they fail their end-term examination. The humiliation of having to stay behind with younger pupils, while your peers moved on, is indeed discouraging. It was felt that more children could be encouraged to stay in school if this pressure was taken off.
In this context, Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE), where children would be evaluated throughout the school year instead of a final examination; and the ‘no-detention-policy’ were included in the RTE Act. Now, the children would be assessed on a year-round system of evaluation, and would be promoted to the next grade. The RTE Act was a major policy shift also in terms of guaranteeing free and compulsory education, as well as for laying down standards for aspects like pupil-teacher ratio, toilets, drinking water, playground etc. It was supposed to fix our ailing elementary education system.
However, what was missing from the government policy discussions, was a focus on the quality of education.
Since 2005, The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) has been reporting on the learning outcomes of children in the age group of 6-14 in rural India. According to ASER 2016 data, more than 50% of Std V students could not read a basic Std II level text in their regional language and only 75% of them could not solve a simple division problem.
This is a considerable decline since 2009 when almost 48% of Std V students could not read such text, and 62% of Std V students could not do division (ASER 2009). But, this decline had set in before 2009. The situation was better in 2007 when 42% of Std V children could not read and 58% could not do division.
The statistics make it clear that the learning outcomes of children have deteriorated consistently in the past decade, except in 2016, when a slight improvement was observed as compared to 2014. But they also make it clear that the learning outcomes were falling even before the policy came around.
Several researchers have argued that the no detention policy exacerbated the already falling learning levels and caused an accumulation of learning deficit. Simply put, if a child is unable to learn what is taught in Std II and is automatically promoted to Std III, it will be very difficult for them to understand the higher grade’s curriculum. And it will get worse when the child is promoted to Std IV. Such children start falling behind in class as it becomes increasingly difficult for them to cope with the curriculum in successive grades.
To tackle the problem of this learning deficit, in 2017, the government agreed that the ‘no detention policy’ had to go.
There is nothing to celebrate about the removal of this policy because the issue that children should not be falling behind in the class at all, is still left unaddressed. It is not the child’s burden to learn, but our education system’s burden to ensure that they learn. The learning deficit occurred precisely because we were unable to teach them and not because they were lacking in the ability to learn. Not detaining children could have only accumulated the deficit, but it was first created by the education system.
Quality of education and ‘learning outcomes’ have not been paid attention to by the Indian education system for long enough. For the last few decades, the government’s focus has been on whether or not children are going to school, and not on whether children going to school are learning or not. It was only last year that the government amended the RTE Act to include mapping of learning outcomes of children, thanks to the efforts of civil society researchers and policy advocates.
Shortage of teacher and the consequent reliance on less qualified contractual teachers, gaps in pedagogy, teacher training and curriculum design, teachers’ attendance etc. still exist. Lacking human resource, schools often have to teach children in multi-grade classrooms. In December 2016, in a reply given in the Lok Sabha, education minister Prakash Javadekar had stated that 17.5% of all government teacher posts were still lying vacant. According to a 2017 report, around 1 lakh schools were single teacher schools. Compliance of other RTE norms is also low.
In this scenario, it is telling that India’s expenditure on education has been reduced to less than 4% of the total central budget, far less than what is recommended and needed. Research has shown that there also is a huge gap between funds allocated and funds utilized at the school and child level.
As per ASER 2016, almost 97% of rural children in the age group of 6-14 are enrolled in school. The ‘no detention policy’ might have been removed but the real problems ailing our school education system are still here and need to be dealt with before we fail another generation of children.