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Mumbai, Jan 10 (PTI) As the "learning gap" among school children creates several challenges for them, addressing this issue by developing key academic skills among them to make them employable later has become crucial, representatives of some organisations working on this have said.
A learning gap emerges when students do not meet their projected learning level, putting them under immense pressure to cope with academics in a short period of time. This becomes a bigger issue as the students fail to develop key academic skills, such as reading and writing, as well as social skills, and they may find it more difficult to develop these skills later in life.
This learning gap impacts children, and without the right support system, they drop out of school or face challenges in subsequent phases of life.
According to the National Education Policy 2020, the top priority for the education system is to ensure all children achieve foundational literacy and numeracy in primary school by 2025.
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As per the Annual Status of Education Report 2023 (ASER 2023) published by Pratham Education Foundation, nearly 25 per cent teens in the country cannot read fluently, and over half struggle with basic division, highlighting a critical learning gap in the country.
P&G Shiksha, P&G India's flagship corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme, is working on reducing the learning gap among children studying in primary schools in a comprehensive and timely way that is crucial for their future, P&G India Head - Corporate Communications and Corporate Social Responsibility, Enakshee Deva told PTI.
"Bridging the learning gap is essential as it only keeps widening as education and the curriculum in the school continues. And this gap eventually widens so much that children face many challenges and sometimes they even drop out because they get completely disengaged," she added.
In one of its interventions, P&G Shiksha is working with 'Pratham' - NGO partner - to develop foundational skills in children aged 3-6 through its 'Early Childhood Education' intervention.
The programme is active in Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Telangana, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, and is implemented directly in some regions, and in partnership with state governments in others.
Several children in the underserved communities, owing to multiple socio-economic reasons, join the formal education system directly in grade one, skipping pre-primary education, which is essential in the formative years for developing basic cognitive, motor, social-emotional skills, Deva said.
"This can translate into the child developing a learning gap and unable to understand basic concepts which is expected of them as per the curriculum. We also work on remediation on grade 2 and 3 children. Therefore, we are also focused on remediation either via community or digital programs to ensure that we are able to bridge it before the child starts to face a huge gap which becomes difficult to address," she added.
Further explaining the work, Pratham Education Foundation, P&G Shiksha's NGO partner for learning gap, CEO Rukmini Banerji said, "From class 3-5, the curriculum is already quite heavy with children expected to do a lot. But when we work with the children, we first try to figure out, can they read and comprehend basic text and arithmetic."
Because, in this programme, Pratham makes a lot of efforts to bring those lagging behind on these foundational skills at par with their counterparts with a whole set of activities.
"To understand the level of each child, we conduct a simple ASER test to understand whether they are able to at least recognise letters. If they recognise letters, are they able to read words, if they can read words, can they read sentences or small paragraphs and so on," she said.
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)
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