Centre has admitted that the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), which was aimed at ensuring universal quality elementary education, has failed to improve the learning achievements of the children in primary schools.

It has also said failure in quality control was a major road block in addressing problems like student absenteeism, increasing drop out rates and out-of-school children.

“Primary school learning achievement is lamentably low,” the Sixth Review Mission of SSA by the Human Resource Development Ministry said in its report.

The deadline for achieving universal quality elementary education for all is 2010. Notwithstanding government claims that the SSA had been given top priority with an outlay of about Rs 6,414 crore (2007-08) the Review Mission observed that improving quality of student learning still remained a major challenge before SSA.

For instance, in Tamil Nadu government’s tests of 2.07 lakh standard V students, mean marks in Mathematics, English and Tamil were 34 per cent, 40 per cent and 63 per cent respectively.

“Learning levels at upper primary stage are very poor too: In NCERT national tests in classes VII and VIII, mean maths test scores were 29.9 per cent and 38.5 per cent respectively and mean science test scores were 36.0 per cent and 40.5 per cent respectively,” it said. The Review Mission also said that central to this challenge would be the revamp of the in-service training programme of teachers and strong follow up of such training.

It said in-service training had reached a plateau with lot of fatigue in organising year after year with hardly any tangible improvement in outcomes i.e. classroom teaching learning process.

“High teacher absence rate in some large states is a major challenge and needs urgent steps,” it observed.
The Review Mission also drew attention to the poor pupil-teacher ratio in primary schools with Bangalore, Kushinagar in Uttar Pradesh and Bhojpur, Buxar, Purnia, Saran and Sheikhpura in Bihar having more than 100 students per teacher.