Priorities for Primary Education Policy in India’s 12th Five-year Plan

Abstract

India has demonstrated considerable progress in the past decade on improving primary school access, infrastructure, pupil–teacher ratios (PTRs), teacher salaries, and student enrollment. Nevertheless, student learning levels and trajectories are disturbingly low. The past decade has also seen a number of high quality empirical studies on the causes and correlates of better learning outcomes based on large samples of data and careful attention paid to identification of causal relationships. The findings from this research are however, not being reflected in the current policy priorities of the Government of India. This paper seeks to bridge the gap by summarizing the research, making policy recommendations based on this research, and suggesting an implementation roadmap for the 12th Plan. The main findings reported in this paper are that there is very little evidence to support the notion that improving school inputs in a “business as usual” manner will improve learning outcomes. On the other hand, innovations in pedagogy (especially supplemental remedial instruction targeted to the level of learning of children) and governance (focused on teacher performance measurement and management) have shown large positive impacts on student learning. The research over the past decade suggests that increasing inputs to primary education in a “business as usual” way

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