ASER- 2024 an endorsement of National Education Policy: Union Minister

Srinagar, Jan 30: The Union Minister of Education, Dharmendra Pradhan has termed the latest Annual Status of Education Report (ASER)-2024 as an endorsement for the National Education Policy (NEP)-2020.

"The ASER 2024 report is a great endorsement for NEP 2020, its focus on developing foundational literacy and numeracy skills and its success in improving learning outcomes," Dharmendra Pradhan wrote on X after holding a meeting with Pratham India.

Pradhan said that as per the report, reading and numeracy skills of children in all grades has improved significantly, with quantum improvements in classes 1 to 3.

"Government schools across India have also shown remarkable gains and outpaced private schools in learning recovery," he said.

He further informed about his "insightful" meeting with the team of Pratham India where they discussed the trends in detail and the way forward to further reduce learning gaps, remove barriers to learning and build on the gains.

Pratham is an innovative learning organization created to improve the quality of education in India. As one of the largest non-governmental organisations in the country, Pratham focuses on high-quality, low-cost and replicable interventions to address gaps in the education system.

ASER-2024 was released on January 28 in New Delhi by co-founders of Pratham Dr. Madhav Chavan and Farida Lambay.

This is the fourteenth 'basic' ASER report which generates district, state and national level estimates of the enrollment status of 3 to 16-year-old children, and basic reading and arithmetic skills of 5 to 16-year-old children.

Additionally, in ASER 2024, older children aged 14 to 16 were asked questions about their digital access and usage and were administered a set of smartphone-based tasks to gauge their digital abilities.

ASER 2024 reached 649491 children in 17997 villages across 605 rural districts in India. Facilitated by Pratham, in each surveyed district, a local organization or institution conducted the survey.