India: Improving learning outcomes is possible at scale

Hindustan Times

6 hours ago

Education lights every stage of the journey to a better life. It is essential for individual potential, economic growth, and social development. Education (HT)
However, all too often, efforts to provide education give children the opportunity to go to school but don't guarantee learning. For example, across 10 low- and middle-income countries, only half of women who had completed primary school had achieved basic literacy.
The World Bank estimates that 70% of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries cannot read or understand an age-appropriate text. Though worse in these countries, ensuring children gain foundational skills to succeed in school and life is a universal challenge.
In the UK, we watched with alarm as our position in the international PISA rankings for 15-year-olds' reading plummeted from 7th in 2000 to 17th by 2006 to 25th by 2009.
What was happening in our schools? As an opposition MP and our Party's education spokesperson, I ventured to find out. From 2005 to 2010, I visited schools weekly and spoke with teachers, experts, and academics, uncovering a deep ideological battle over how children are taught to read.
The so-called 'Reading Wars' began in the US in the 1950s with the book 'Why Johnny Can't Read' (1955). It blamed declining reading standards on new teaching methods that no longer taught the sounds of the alphabet and how to blend those sounds into words. This was known as phonics and was claimed to be a boring way to teach children to read; better, some said, to teach children to identify words on sight and by cues, such as the story or grammar context or even by looking at the picture. The only problem with this approach is that it didn't work for thousands of children and there was no evidence that such methods helped children learn to read.
Once we came into government in 2010, and I became schools minister, we changed the law to require teachers to teach reading using systematic phonics. We also changed the teachers' standards, so all primary teachers had to be able to teach systematic synthetic phonics. We introduced a test for all 6-year-olds, the phonics screening check, to ensure schools were teaching decoding and 'sounding out'. It also helped identify early those children struggling with reading.
Gradually, reading rates improved and more students, particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds, became better readers. England rose from joint 8th in 2016 for 9-year-olds' reading to 4th in the world in 2021. Outperformed only by Russia, Hong Kong, and Singapore, England became known as 'best in the West'. And in the PISA study of 15-year-olds' reading, England has now risen to 13th.
What we achieved in England demonstrates that implementing improvements in foundational skills at scale is perfectly possible. And India provides another example. According to its National Education Policy 2020, over 50 million elementary-grade children lack foundational literacy and numeracy skills.
The Indian government responded by making foundational literacy and numeracy its top education priority and launched the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN) Bharat Mission.
It is one of the largest foundational education programmes in the world, reaching over 50 million children and 1.7 million teachers across more than 600,000 schools, backed by over $290 million annually.
The latest Annual Status of Education (ASER) report, covering nearly 650,000 children across 605 rural districts—the highest-ever participation—shows the share of Grade 3 children who can read a Grade 2-level text rose from 16.3% in 2022 to 23.4% in 2024. The proportion of Grade 3 pupils in government schools able to solve a basic subtraction problem climbed from 25.9% to 33.7% over the same period, recording the highest gains in two decades.
Regional results are equally strong. For example, Uttar Pradesh's government schools raised reading levels by 15 points, from 12.3% in 2018 to 27.9% in 2024, and numeracy proficiency grew from 26.9% to 40.7%.
India's experience holds many lessons, especially for low and middle-income countries grappling with entrenched educational inequities and post-pandemic learning losses, but I want to highlight two.
First, since its launch in 2021, the NIPUN Bharat Mission has been backed by clear national and state-level targets, dedicated budgets, and routine public tracking of progress. Accountability measures such as Uttar Pradesh's NIPUN Bharat Monitoring Centre enable local officials to review data and trigger remedial action when needed.
Second, the Mission trains teachers in evidence-based practices to teach literacy and numeracy, including phonics and decoding for reading. This mirrors the reform we implemented in England and has shown significant results, with over 1.7 million teachers trained--a scale without precedent.
These are promising results, but there is more to do, and it is critical that India stays the course.
An extension beyond its 2026–27 deadline would allow the Mission to broaden its reach, embed reforms into routine practice, and generate more sustained, system-wide change--turning early momentum into lasting transformation.
As we've seen in England, policy grounded in evidence, backed by political will, and delivered consistently at scale can change lives. India's NIPUN Bharat Mission is proof of that and deserves both renewal and the time to finish the job.
This article is authored by Sir Nick Gibb, former minister of state, department of education, UK, and co-author of a forthcoming book 'Reforming Lessons' published by Routledge.