By Venita Kaul and Krishnan S
In a recently issued letter to the state governments and Union Territories, the Ministry of Education, Government of India, reiterated its call to ensure that only children of “six plus” years of age are granted admission in grade one. There is nothing surprising about this as it aligns with the directives highlighted in the National Education Policy 2020 to ensure that only children aged six and above enter grade one. Despite this, more than half the children enrolled in government schools in grade one across over 15 states, are below the age of six.
Despite the programmatic and demand-side complexities involved in rolling out this policy, this is the right move for India’s early learners, as endorsed by experts and implemented in other aspirational education systems. Among member nations of OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), an average of 51% students reported that they started primary school at the age of six years and 27% reported that they started at the age of seven. Clever Lands, an ethnographic study of the five best performing education systems on PISA, identifies (among other factors) six or seven years as the minimum entry age as a common thread unifying these countries, and high quality preschool prior to that. Starting grade one at six years of age, instead of earlier, can have significant benefits for a child’s overall development and ability to handle the academic demands of formal schooling since by then the child is adequately mature and school ready if s/he has had access to a high quality early childhood stimulation.
The early years below six have been identified as sensitive years for development of skills and competencies that provide the building blocks for later academic learning through play based pedagogies. These building blocks include development of basic sensory-motor and language skills, learning of basic concepts, which help to understand the environment, important cognitive skills such as attention, memory; social -emotional skills such as sharing, cooperation, self-regulation and the ability to get along with others. More than 95% of brain development happens by age six and children between the ages three to six years must be provided a variety of stimuli in the form of locally available play materials, peer and adult child interaction, small and large group games and activities, songs and stories, conversations, book handling experiences and free play in activity corners to develop their reasoning skills, vocabulary and oral language, interpersonal skills, fine/gross motor skills, creativity and problem solving abilities.
The five to six age group is particularly important to build more focused school readiness skills for grade one, which include cognitive and language/ literacy skills like sequential thinking, seriation, pattern making, print awareness, shared/guided reading, phonemic awareness and decoding. Longitudinal research in India (IECEI 2017) has demonstrated that integration of play-based pedagogies into early primary grades (Foundation stage) ensures better academic outcomes in language and math in later years as compared to moving into formal instruction in grades one and two.
Current status:
Nearly one in two children enrolled in grade one in government primary schools is below six years of age. Additionally, ASER 2022 found that fewer five-year-olds are in anganwadis when compared with the three and four-year-old cohorts. The remaining go to private schools or private pre-schools, which are largely under-regulated on learning quality. This migration may be attributed to parental demand for more ‘formal’ education in schools instead of continuing with a third year of ECE in anganwadis. On the other hand, the private sector paints a contrasting picture: on an average, a grade one student in private school is older than a grade one student in government school. Essentially, children in Government schools enter grade one sooner, with poorer pre-school experience, adding to the socio-economic disadvantages in learning that they anyway have to struggle against.
Way forward:
Implementing a standard entry age criteria can raise many challenges such as a drop in grade one enrolment rates in the first year of implementation, concerns and confusion among parents and availability of quality pre-primary options for all children. Some recommendations on how state governments can go about this critical reform:
1. Have a clear age and month cut off: It is important to fix a month and age cut off window for grade one entry. For example: most states follow “that the child must have completed the age of six years before June 1 of the academic year to be eligible for admission into any government aided or private unaided schools”. This may need to be adapted based on the States’ academic year (whether starting in January, April or July), and decentralized to individual state governments, while ensuring the cutoff falls within a window of a few months before the academic year begins (eg. December-March)
2. Move the entry age to six years over two academic cycles: Implementing a new entry age within States can be done in a phased manner to ensure that in the first year of implementation, the grade one class doesn’t remain empty. For example, over a two year period, entry age can be increased from five to five and a half and then to six years.
3. Improve parental awareness and streamline messaging: In many States, parental perceptions of and preferences for pre-school education inform enrolment to grade one before time. It is imperative for parents to know the reasons for moving the entry age by a year to six years, for the benefits that will accrue in terms of a sound foundation for learning for the child and the related importance of early learning. They need to be also familiarized with the features of quality ECE and the harms of early academic instruction. This can be communicated through mass media campaigns (as a message from the CM, for instance), as well as, through individual/community level messaging via parent-teacher meetings and School Management Committee meet ups. Parents and community members need to be reassured that their children will benefit from and not fall behind or lose out on a year if they enroll in grade one at the age of six years.
4. Invest in high-quality preschool programmes in anganwadis and Government schools:
India’s policies on ECE provisions are progressive and far-reaching, however, service delivery continues to be scattered (spread across multiple systems and ministries), under-prioritized (few dedicated teachers, low instructional time in anganwadis, duplication of roles for anganwadi teachers and other frontline workers) and consequently ineffective (poor school readiness levels at age five and six). Greater investments in ECE in terms of budgets, prioritization, dedicated teachers and programme improvement to increase effective learning time for our three to six year olds can set them up strongly for success in school and in life.
The author of this article is Venita Kaul, professor emerita (education), Ambedkar University Delhi and Krishnan S, associate director, Central Square Foundation.