“India pioneers volunteer-led assessment of educational standards ”

"Here's a very clever idea. The background is that over the last decade, education policy in the developing world has been dominated by the issue of access. Getting kids into school was the priority and all the millennium development goals relating to education were about access, for example, gender parity.

The result, as has been well reported, is a sharp rise in enrolment rates across many African and Asian countries. But the problem has been a widespread, but largely anecdotal, perception that educational achievement has fallen. In my visits to Uganda in the last few years, I kept on hearing complaints about overcrowded schools, a lack of textbooks and poor teacher-children ratios.

Despite pledges of increased funding for education from international donors to support improved access, the money often didn't seem to percolate down to the schools where it was needed. This is also the story in India. Enrolment rates are now running at about 95%, and a new tax has been introduced to pay for universal primary education.

But Rukmini Banerji, director of an NGO, Pratham, discovered disturbing signs that children didn't seem to benefiting. The children may have been at school, but what were they actually learning​? No one seemed to know. The only assessment the government carried out was a national sample once every three to four years, but it didn't cover all educational districts. So six years ago, Pratham took on the enormous task of finding out what Indian children were learning.

The results were horrifying. Some 50% of children after five years in school could not read at the level expected after two years of schooling; millions of children were falling behind and being consigned to educational failure (all the international studies show that once kids fall behind – fail to learn the alphabet properly, for example – it is very difficult for them to catch up).

In bald figures, of India's 200 million children, 195 million are now in school but fewer than 100 million are actually learning to read and do basic maths. They may be in school for five hours a day, but it is not doing them or the country much good.