Kerala and Tamil Nadu Emerge as Top Performers in NITI Aayog's Education Quality Index

New Delhi: Kerala and Tamil Nadu have retained their places as the best states in terms of quality of school education as per NITI Aayog’s School Education Quality Index released earlier this week.

While Kerala was given a total evaluation point of 82.2%, Tamil Nadu got 73.4%. The SEQI report, which analysed the quality of education for 2016-2017, placed Haryana, Assam and Uttar Pradesh among the top three states for its incremental progress (compared to 2015-2016).

The Education Index for Haryana revealed a progress of 18.5% placing the state in the first position. Meanwhile, Assam came in a close second having registered a rise of 16.4% while Uttar Pradesh had improved by 13.64%.

Uttarakhand and Karnataka were the only states to have negative results scoring -1.33% and – 3.61% scores.

This is the first time that the government think tank has come up with a report on the educational progress. The report was compiled in collaboration with Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MHRD), the World Bank and sector experts and assesses states on the quality of education based on 30 critical indicators.

These indicators have been categorised under “Outcomes”, which include “Learning outcomes”, “Access outcomes”, “Infrastructure and facilities for outcomes”, “Equity outcomes” and second category being “Governance processes aiding outcomes.”

NITI Aayog developed the School Education Quality Index (SEQI) to evaluate the performance of states and union territories (UTs) in the school education sector with the aim to bring an education policy focused on outcomes by providing States and UTs with a platform to identify their strengths and weaknesses.

The SEQI was released on Monday by the NITI Aayog Vice Chairman, Dr Rajiv Kumar in the presence of NITI Aayog Member Dr Vinod Paul, CEO Amitabh Kant and Secretary in the Department of School Education and Literacy, Rina Ray. The event was also attended bt representatives from the MHRD and the World Bank.

The survey made an overt effort not to compare apples with oranges and instead group tge states and UTs into large states, small states and UTs. The indicator values were then appropriately scaled, normalised and weighted to generate an overall performance score and ranking for each state and UT.

Overall performance hides variations

Additionally, there is an index on the states’ overall performance that does not show the variations in their performance on the underlying categories. Among the twenty large states in the country, ten perform have performed well in the “Outcomes category, while the others have performed considerably better in the “Governance Processes Aiding Outcomes” category.

The most significant differences were observed in the cases of Karnataka, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh under this category. Odisha, Punjab and Haryana perform better on the Governance Processes Aiding Outcomes category.

Among the small states, Manipur, Tripura and Goa were ranked well in the “Outcomes category”. Sikkim is the only small state to have performed well in the “Governance Processes Aiding Outcomes” category.

Among the seven UTs, four registered an improvement in their performance in the “Outcomes” category while Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Delhi, Daman & Diu and Lakshadweep showed better performance in the Governance Processes Aiding Outcomes category.

The performance of the states’ and UTs’ on learning outcomes are based on their results in the National Achievement Survey (NAS) 2017. Their performance on Access Outcomes is primarily driven by enrolment ratios at the secondary level and transition rates from upper-primary to secondary level.

In terms of “Infrastructure & Facilities for Outcomes”, states’ and UTs’ performance is strongly linked to the presence of Computer Aided-Learning (CAL) at the elementary level and vocational education at the secondary and senior-secondary level.

SEQI also included an analysis of states and Union Territories for each indicator under-study. For instance, indicators such as average score in Class 3, 5 and 8 for Language and Mathematics, Transition Rates from primary to upper-primary level, capturing equity in learning outcomes between general and marginalised sections of society, supply a wealth of data for future action and policy design for every state.