NEW DELHI: India’s school education system has solved much of the “getting children into school” challenge, but is struggling with a tougher problem – keeping them there long enough to complete secondary and higher secondary education.The stress points are now visible higher up the schooling ladder – gross enrolment ratio (GER) drops from 90.9% at primary level to 58.4% at higher secondary, while secondary-stage dropout rate rises sharply to 11.5% from 0.3% at primary, according to a new Niti Aayog report.The report – School Education System in India: Temporal Analysis and Policy Roadmap for Quality Enhancement – paints a picture of a vast, but uneven system comprising 14.71 lakh schools, 24.69 crore students and about 1.01 crore teachers, with the sharpest cracks now emerging beyond the elementary stage.It says the system today is “strongest on basic access and weakest on continuity, inclusion, and learning depth”.The numbers illustrate the challenge clearly. India’s GER stands at 90.9% at primary stage and 90.3% at upper primary, but falls sharply to 78.7% at secondary, and further to 58.4% at higher-secondary level.Transition rates weaken steadily as students move up the system. While 92.2% of students move from primary to upper primary, the rate falls to 86.6% between upper primary and secondary, and to 75.1% between secondary and higher secondary. The secondary stage has emerged as the biggest stress point. The national dropout rate is just 0.3% at primary and 3.5% at upper primary, but jumps to 11.5% at secondary level.

“While near-universal access has been achieved at the primary stage, enrolment at the higher secondary level… presents a significant opportunity to further expand participation,” the report states. It adds that “strengthening transition rates at each stage, particularly after upper primary…can help ensure smoother progression and sustained engagement in schooling.”The report says the next phase of reform can no longer focus only on expanding enrolment or infrastructure, but must address “fragmented school structures, foundational learning deficits, inequities in inclusion, gaps in teacher and leadership ecosystems, infrastructure disparities, and governance weaknesses”.Structural inefficiencies remain significant. More than one-third of schools have fewer than 50 students, while over 1.04 lakh schools continue to function as single-teacher institutions serving nearly 34 lakh students. At the same time, the report records major gains in infrastructure over the last decade. Functional electricity is now available in 91.9% of schools, girls’ toilets in 94%, computers in 64.7%, internet connectivity in 63.5%, and smart classrooms in 30.6% of schools nationally.