Annual Status of Education Report (rural) 2021

The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) is a citizen-led household survey that provides nationally representative estimates of children’s schooling status and their foundational reading and arithmetic skills. In its standard format, the survey reaches children in the age group of 3-16 in almost all rural districts of India. The COVID-19 crisis made it impossible to conduct a field-based survey on national scale in 2020 and 2021. However, the need to capture the effects of the pandemic and school closures on children’s access to learning opportunities was crucial. ASER 2020 was therefore redesigned as a phone survey which gathered information on the impact of the pandemic on different aspects of children’s education. ASER 2021 retains the phone survey format. More than 3000 volunteers across the country spoke to parents and teachers, aiming to understand how children in the age group of 5-16 have studied at home since the onset of the pandemic and the challenges that schools and households now face as schools reopen. Topics explored included the provision of, and access to, remote education mechanisms and materials in rural parts of the country, and how children, families, and educators were engaging with these from their homes. A second part of the survey focused on children whose school had reopened, asking questions about children’s attendance and COVID prevention measures being followed by schools, among others.