Gunotsav school assessment scheme isn’t really improving education quality

Billed as Narendra Modi’s ‘brainchild’, the system for government schools is possibly being gamed.

For more than 20 years, the keywords and phrases driving school education in India have been “learning levels”, “quality”, “competencies” and “outcomes”. For almost as long, government school students have been tested to establish how they measure up, through the National Achievement Surveys and later through State Learning Achievement Surveys.

From the mid-2000s, the Aser Centre – which grew out of the educational non-profit Pratham – started conducting its annual learning achievement surveys, published in the form of the Annual Status of Education Report or Aser report. This assessment, of mostly poor, rural elementary school children, drew public attention to low learning levels in this demographic across the country.




Clearly irked by Gujarat’s poor performance in the Aser surveys and unhappy with its methodology, the Gujarat government settled on a new assessment and school ratings system in 2009. It was called Gunotsav – a “festival of quality”.

Billed as the brainchild of Narendra Modi, then the Gujarat chief minister, it was designed as an appraisal system for government-funded schools to ensure each school got what it needed in order to improve quality – from bricks and mortar to specific types of teacher training. It was meant to be a means by which schools could pinpoint their own shortcomings and find ways to fix them.

Schools are currently classified in ascending order from D to A+, based on an annual assessment of their academic performance, co-curricular activities, community participation and available infrastructure. Teachers are also graded, and at least initially only those with A or A+ grades were eligible to be nominated for teachers’ awards.

Gunotsav was not meant to be a permanent feature on the school calendar, according to RP Gupta, the state’s principal secretary of school education in 2009, currently at the Niti Aayog. It was just the first step towards creating the office of an independent evaluator, much like the UK’s Office for Standards in Education or Ofsted, whose remit extends to teachers’ education. Gupta said that a government order to that effect was passed in 2011.

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તમારી શાળાનું ગુણોત્સવ નું પરિણામ જોવા માટે અહી ક્લિક કરો


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💥📢ગુણોત્સવ પરિણામ 202-23 રાજ્યની તમામ શાળાઓમાં તમારી શાળાનો ક્રમ

Around the same time time, Pragna – the state’s activity based learning programme – was also being introduced in schools. Its central premise is to allow children to learn at their own pace, moving ahead only once they have actually learnt a concept. An annual assessment militates against learning at one’s own pace. But Gupta said that it was hoped that eventually all academic assessments would be “through Pragna”, which, in ideal conditions, has a system of continuous assessment built into its step-by-step learning process.

ગુણોત્સવ 2.0માં મુલ્યાંકનનુ નવુ માળખું

અહીથી વાંચો માર્ગદર્શિકા

In the first two Gunotsavs, schools reflected the middling to poor results of all the different types of surveys that had preceded it. In the third year, Gunotsav results showed an upward swing. The other surveys – albeit each using a different methodology – continued to paint a rather grim picture. Nine years after Gunotsav first started, it seems not so much has changed in Gujarat’s government schools after all.