The 14th Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), released by the Pratham Foundation on January 28, 2025, offers promising insights into the recovery of school education after the pandemic. The report highlights that learning outcomes in India, particularly in rural areas, are either back to pre-pandemic levels or improving. This recovery is attributed to a combination of factors, including students returning to school and the focus of the New Education Policy (NEP) on foundational literacy and numeracy.

The ASER survey, which covered nearly 650,000 children across 17,997 villages in 605 rural districts, suggests that government schools have improved faster than private schools, especially in arithmetic skills. This rapid recovery can be largely credited to the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN) Bharat Mission, launched in 2021, which focuses on improving foundational skills for students up to Grade III.

Despite this recovery, challenges persist, including wide state-level disparities in learning outcomes and recovery. While there have been improvements in basic arithmetic skills across most states, some states still lag behind pre-pandemic levels, especially in reading abilities. Moreover, learning outcomes remain poor overall, with significant variation between states.

Another notable point in the report is that private school enrollment has increased in rural areas, signaling a recovery in income levels, as many families who had shifted children to government schools during the pandemic due to financial constraints have now returned to private institutions.

Overall, while the ASER 2024 report shows significant recovery, it also underscores the uneven progress and the ongoing need for targeted interventions, especially in improving literacy and numeracy in the early years of schooling.

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