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“By 2025, every student in Grade 5 and beyond has achieved foundational literacy and numeracy”

The above quoted objective is the crux of National Education Policy Draft’s chapter on Foundational Literacy and Numeracy, which begins with an acknowledgment of the learning crisis that has been plaguing the Indian education system for years. In making this argument, it seconds ASER documents and World Bank reports, wherein they point out alarming data on how more than 50 % of India’s population is unable to adequately read, write or engage with numbers. The draft concedes the immediacy of this crisis as it wastes no time in establishing the ways in which it hopes the government would tackle this problem. Despite this recognition and a well-intended objective, one observes that the draft is vague in its proposed solutions, alongside certain factors that propagate the learning crisis.

In order to get to these issues, one will have to first understand their proposed solutions.

In this draft, the K Kasturirangan Committee set about resolving the problem by claiming that a major cause for the crisis is the “lack of school preparedness” or the lack of early childhood care. They lay out a framework for parents and anganwadis in the draft’s previous chapter to account for this care and preparedness. A school preparation module will be introduced for the first 3 months of grade 1 to ensure that students are equipped with the necessary cognitive tools to start their syllabus. The draft also argues for an increased focus on foundational skills in these early grades as they plan to redesign classroom material, hold language/mathematics weeks and melas etc (59). This will be accompanied by the National Tutors programme, wherein senior students with good academic records will tutor their junior counterparts.

The committee has also recognised the importance of nutrition and health in a child’s education. It puts forth an expanded mid-day meal programme to ensure that the classroom is more productive than usual (58). In this context, they have had much wider perspective on trying to understand what factors affect education.

They propose “a mission-mode dedication to remediation” for all students who are already in school, having fallen behind their expected level. They hope to achieve this through the “Remedial Instructions Aides Programme,” a temporary project of 10 years that will draw instructors from local communities to hold special remediation classes, during and after school hours (60).  While the idea in itself is necessary, it is not expanded on in the draft and therein lies the vagueness of this chapter. The programme is meant to help students “who have fallen behind” but there is no clarity on whether the help is restricted to foundational education. Does this mean that the programme will help a 7^th grader in reading or writing but will not be equipped to help them reach their grade level? In such a situation, the learning crisis will not be resolved as the transition from foundational to their required level of academics will not take place.

There is a mention of “second chance education programmes” in the following chapter on dropouts. Dropouts who are of the age 15 and above will be enrolled in adult education schemes to attain foundational literacy. However, they could also follow this up with vocational training programmes and an elaboration on how transition can take place to ensure the student is able to stay on his/her required level (70). The draft is lacking in a discussion on transition from foundational basics.

Educationist Anita Rampal, in her comments on the draft would point out that while the draft accepts the problems of rote learning in primary education, it does not address the fact that this mechanical mode of pedagogy looms over the Indian education system in general. This is important as it highlights the fact that even if one assumes that the proposed solutions will produce students with strong foundational skills, they will still have to enter a system in their secondary school wherein the focus is on lecture based rote learning. Therefore, it is not just dropouts who would struggle with transitioning to their level of academic expectation. The students coming up might also face the same set of issues as this point calls for the need to address pedagogy across the system to minimise the significance of rote learning. The issue of transition is not just in terms of content, it could also be in the context of teaching methods.

In conclusion, the point being made is that our nation’s learning crisis is not limited to attaining foundational literacy. While it is of the utmost importance and the draft has put thought into tackling that issue, it is incomplete without a plan to help students transition to their existing levels.

Gokulnath is a Research Associate with the Centre for Policy Research.

Perspective is of the author and does not represent an institutional stand.

In my previous blog I discussed the burden of non-teaching tasks that teachers routinely engage in and findings from a self-reported time use study and perception survey we conducted with government teachers in Delhi (link to the report here). The study involved 200 teachers from two of the largest education departments in Delhi i.e. the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) and Directorate of Education (DoE).

Here I will address how the new National Education Policy draft addresses the question of non-teaching tasks and what changes it proposes in this regard.                                                             

Election and survey duties remain

The draft NEP retains teachers’ role in election and survey duties. Election duty, particularly BLO (Booth Level Officer) duty, has been a longstanding sore point for teachers because it involves going to door-to-door updating the electoral roll. In our perception survey, female teachers in particular often raised issues of personal safety, having to travel to far-off localities and working well into the night for election duties. While some states have banned the involvement of teachers in BLO work outright, others continue to engage teachers in the same. Recently, NITI Aayog recommended stopping the deployment of teachers as BLOs, however the Election Commission stated this was ‘unwarranted’.¹

The involvement of teachers in official surveys has been a contentious issue for similar reasons. In Delhi, we found that MCD school teachers in particular were more occupied with surveys, reportedly spending 14 days on average on the same. Teachers were mostly involved in conducting the Child Census, as well as an unofficial door-to-door survey around admissions season to increase enrolment in their school’s locality. At times, teachers also reported being pulled into surveys that were removed from the sphere of education entirely, such as a survey of functional streetlights in the locality.

The MDM burden doubled

While the NEP clearly specifies teachers are not to be involved in cooking mid-day meals (MDM), it fails to account for the time teachers spend on managing MDM every day. Time use data from Delhi, showed that MDM routinely exceeded the allotted 20 minutes, with teachers spending upwards of half an hour on average on the task. This was due to the time taken to queue up the class, assist children in washing their hands, taste and distribute food, wash their tiffins and help clean up afterwards. Furthermore, teachers are then required to record and upload MDM data online. The time required for this daily activity remains underestimated and could potentially be doubled with the introduction of breakfast in schools, as proposed in the draft NEP.

School complexes – a boon or bane?

The draft proposes the creation of school complexes, which will include one secondary school along with other schools offering lower classes within the same neighbourhood. Among other things, the school complex will be an organisational unit allowing for the sharing of resources across schools in the complex. However, the responsibility for managing the complex, and handling its administrative, financial and academic affairs has been handed to the principal of the secondary school, who will also be the head of the complex. The effects of the burden placed on one school, will inevitably trickle down to its teachers who could potentially be pulled into additional school complex management related charges, for instance maintaining records of resources and staff shared across the complex. Our study found that teachers who were given heavy ‘additional charges’ generally ended up delegating the work among other teachers, therefore affecting multiple teachers’ teaching time and leading to a collective feeling of being overwhelmed with administrative work.

The responsibility of recordkeeping and data management

Findings from our perception survey showed that 93% of teachers felt paperwork took up a lot of time. This was due to data duplication, records being maintained in both hardcopy and softcopy, as well as lack of or poor quality of clerical and IT staff. Overall recordkeeping reportedly occupied 9% and 11% of time in MCD and DoE schools respectively.

The NEP draft proposes support staff to handle general administration and “any non-teaching tasks”. While this is a welcome move, particularly in schools where there is presently no administrative staff, it should be noted that having support staff alone may not suffice. Our teacher time use study in Delhi, found that despite having clerical and IT staff for instance, teachers in DoE schools remained heavily involved in recordkeeping and data management. Clerks in DoE schools often willfully stayed away from maintaining and managing school records and data, instead limiting themselves to handling salary records. It is crucial therefore, to clearly define non-teaching tasks to include work such as recordkeeping and data management, and simultaneously expand the role of clerical staff to incorporate the same.

Arriving at a definition of “non-teaching” work

Findings from our perception survey, highlighted confusion among teachers regarding the exact range of their roles and responsibilities. This was particularly the case for work that was neither directly teaching-learning related nor entirely clerical and far removed from their core job as teachers, but fell somewhere between the two extremes. This included for example, teachers’ involvement in MDM, health check-ups and responding to official mails and circulars.

A reason for this confusion is the RTE Act itself. While Section 27 of the RTE states that teachers are prohibited from being deployed for “non-educational purposes other than the decennial population census, disaster relief and election duties”, Section 24 lists the duties of a teacher and vaguely states that teachers must “perform such other duties as may be prescribed.” Meanwhile, the NEP draft only uses the term “non-teaching work”, and vaguely defines this as “any time-consuming administrative assignments”. This leaves enough wiggle room and does not help in moving towards a clearer definition of the work teachers should and should not be doing.

In order to make its proposal of removing teachers from all non-teaching work actionable, the NEP should first consider clearly defining what the terms ‘non-teaching’ and ‘non-educational’ work entail. Additionally, in its proposed comprehensive review of the RTE Act, the drafting committee should consider including this definition and addressing the issue of RTE exempt duties like election and survey work, so as to further emphasise its commitment to freeing teachers from non-academic tasks and allowing them to focus squarely on their core role of enabling teaching-learning.

Also read our second piece on NEP: Going Beyond Foundational Learning 

References

1. Kalra, A. (2019, May 8). In Elections, Teachers are like Malko from ‘Newton’, Supportive and Unsung. The Wire. Retrieved from https://thewire.in/

“We have to be counsellors, teachers, government servants, surveyors, mothers and clerks, all at once.”

This statement by a primary school teacher in Delhi, encapsulates the various roles teachers fulfill, many of which are far removed from their core role of enabling teaching-learning. The teacher in question described feeling guilty and frustrated about not being able to spend enough time with her students, and instead having to divert more time towards administrative and other non-academic tasks.

This sentiment is a common one and as a result, recent years have seen an increased focus on understanding the non-teaching tasks teachers do and how this impacts the classroom.

Teachers across the country are found to be engaged in a range of non-teaching work such as election duties, vaccination campaigns, cattle census, government surveys, as well as Aadhaar or ration card verification. Last year, a study by the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA), found that teachers spend only 19% of their time on teaching and teaching-related activities. Meanwhile the rest of their time is spent on non-teaching core activities (over 42%), as well as school management and other education department related work (38%). 

The newly released draft National Education Policy (NEP), acknowledges non-teaching work as one of the biggest problems facing teachers and attempts to address the issue, stating:

“…aside from the minimal Supreme Court directives related to election duty and conducting surveys, teachers will not be requested nor allowed to participate in any non-teaching activities during school hours that affect their capacities as teachers.”

The draft goes on to cite some specific examples of non-teaching work teachers will be removed from, including: “Cooking midday meals, participating in vaccination campaigns, procuring school supplies”, which is a start, particularly in light of NIEPA’s findings. However, it fails to go into sufficient detail about the range of non-teaching work teachers are engaged in, vaguely including “any other time-consuming administrative assignments.” The NEP does not specify a benchmark for what is considered ‘time-consuming’ in the average teaching day.

Findings from Delhi

In order to understand how teachers spend their time in school, Accountability Initiative conducted a time use study with 200 teachers from both Municipal Council of Delhi (MCD) and Department of Education (DoE) schools across all 13 education districts of Delhi (the report can be found here). The study included a self-reported time use component which measured the time teachers spent on various activities during a school day, and a perception survey to understand how teachers view their roles and responsibilities, their professional identity and workload, as well as their overall experience of working in Delhi’s government schools. Using purposive sampling, teachers who were identified as the ‘busiest’ by their Head of School and colleagues, were selected. This was done in order to capture just how high teachers’ workload can get.

The perception survey showed that 66% of teachers identified non-academic work as the biggest hurdle they face in school. Majority of teachers identified administrative tasks not directly related to teaching-learning as ‘clerical’ and felt they should not be doing them. For example, 87% and 89% of respondents felt they should not have any role in seeding student Aadhaar cards and the opening or closing of student bank accounts, respectively.

Meanwhile, the time-use data showed that teachers were only able to teach for less than half their time in school. MCD and DoE teachers spent 49% and 52% of time in school, on academic activities (ref. figure below), respectively. However, if other academic tasks like sports, classroom management and teaching-learning supporting activities are excluded, the data shows that teaching alone comprised only 41% of time in MCD schools and 39% of time in DoE schools. School management tasks meanwhile took up 39% and 36% of time in MCD and DoE schools respectively.

Teachers regularly faced disruptions while teaching and this was found to be largely due to routine, essential school management work such as marking and uploading student attendance and mid-day meal (MDM) data. Since MCD schools are only for primary classes, this also included activities like safely handing over students to the parents at the end of the day or staying back after school with students whose parents were late to collect them. In the case of DoE schools, start-of-day classroom management, timetabling and absentee teacher arrangements, as well as checking and responding to mails and circulars, made up the bulk of school management time.

Teachers were also found to be engaged in recordkeeping and data management work, which was often needlessly time consuming due to student data being maintained in multiple formats, as well infrastructure and resource constraints.

Finally, school management tasks often spilled beyond official school hours. Of the 39 hours DoE teachers reported working beyond school timings, 51% time was spent on finishing school management tasks. In the case of MCD schools which reported 49 hours of teachers working beyond school timings, school management work constituted a whopping 94%. Furthermore, instances were found of teachers being sent out of school during school hours, to run errands at the local market, bank and in the case of MCD schools, to the tax office to file income tax returns for all school staff.

The scope of non-teaching work is broad, and there is variation in the types of non-teaching tasks teachers are pulled into, from state to state. In part two of this blog, I look at what the draft NEP proposes to change, and why there is a need for determining exactly what constitute ‘non-teaching’ tasks.

Anupriya Singh is a Research Associate at Accountability Initiative.

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References

1. Puppala, A. (2018, September 22). Teachers spend only 19.1 per cent time teaching. Deccan Chronicle, Retrieved from http://www.deccanchronicle.com NIEPA