There is a figure that should trouble every policymaker who believes that India’s best days are ahead. It is not the fiscal deficit or its demographic dividend. It’s like this: In grades 6, 7, and 8, the middle years of schooling, when teen brains are at their most cognitive plastic — most capable of learning, adapting, and creating lifelong pathways — the national average score in math is only 37%. Performance in science is only slightly better.
This is not a new discovery. The National Achievement Survey of 2021 established this clearly. The PARAKH 2024 evaluation confirmed this. What is shocking is not the data, but the slow response it has caused. India has built a national conversation around foundational literacy and numeracy. The NIPUN India Mission mobilized extraordinary administrative energy to ensure that every child can read and do basic arithmetic by Grade 3, and the ASER 2024 documents real, albeit partial, improvements in early grade education. This is worth celebrating.
Even if the foundation floor is rising, the middle stage continues to function as a roof. With 6.3 crore children currently enrolled in grades 6-8, this threshold makes a lot of sense. In a country where fertility has declined to ~1.9, and the share of young children is declining, the pressure point in the system has shifted upward. In the next five years, children aged 11-14 will constitute about 8-9% of India’s population, that is, more than 12 crore young adolescents and almost a third of all children. The question is no longer whether children enter school, but whether the system can carry this large and continuing group through the middle years, where the path to secondary education is either secure or quietly broken.
This makes the quality of middle school pedagogy not just a classroom concern, but a system-level imperative. These are the years when students begin to develop disciplinary thinking, form habits of mind, and understand how to organize and apply knowledge – making it essential that teaching balances structure, engagement, and adolescent developmental needs. Therefore, effective pedagogy must move beyond rote learning to develop disciplinary thinking, helping students think like practitioners in each subject. Approaches such as inquiry-based learning, problem-solving, modeling expert thinking, discussion, collaborative work, and formative assessment are critical to ensuring that this large group not only stays in school, but learns meaningfully.
Encouragingly, this limit is not inevitable – and evidence of what is possible is already emerging in practice. In Bihar, a state not typically associated with systemic education reform, large-scale changes in classroom practice are already showing what reform at this level might look like.
Between 2022 and 2024, the state introduced project-based learning (PBL) in grades 6-8 for science and mathematics. SCERT co-designed teaching materials, initiated teacher training led by DIET, Block Resource Persons supported peer teaching, and provided mentorship in continued implementation. The program reached 40 lakh students from 28,000 schools.
The results evaluated by Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) are astonishing. Math scores at the endline increased from 43.74% to 52.33%; Science from 43.25% to 52.33%, a combined average improvement of 8.84 percentage points. Students in Years 7 and 8 made almost two years’ worth of learning progress in a single year. The percentage of teachers actively implementing PBL increased from 50% to 95%. Educators have also begun to see meaningful changes in students’ 21st-century skills – an aspect that the National Institute for Advanced Study will formally measure in the coming year.
This is not a small pilot whose results may not hold up at scale. It gives a clear indication of what systems-based change and design for scale can achieve, and, conversely, what remains absent elsewhere.
India’s education system was built for a different demographic and socio-cultural reality. Today’s learning crisis is not, primarily, a crisis of access. The enrollment ratio at the middle level has increased to more than 90%. More children are staying in school than ever before.
But the problem is that being in school and learning are not the same thing.
The experience of Bihar makes clear what is currently lacking in the system. According to various assessments, the difference is not only in content, but also in capacity. PARAKH 2024 shows that students struggle with data interpretation, scientific reasoning, communication and practical application, the same competencies that project-based learning attempts to build.
This difference is not accidental. Classroom practice remains over-reliant on rote instructions, where memorization substitutes for understanding. Although this may provide short-term benefits, it rarely leads to the ability to apply knowledge in unfamiliar contexts. Global evidence from the World Economic Forum to the OECD consistently highlights that the most important skills for the future of work are analytical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration and the ability to continuously learn. These are not skills that emerge merely through rote learning or elementary classroom instruction. These are formed when young teens begin to ask questions, connect ideas, work with others, and apply knowledge in real-world contexts.
The International Labor Organisation’s India Employment Report 2024 documents a skills gap affecting 30-40% of the workforce. Youth aged 15-29 constitute 83% of India’s unemployed. India’s demographic window will start closing around 2040, about 15 years away. As this window narrows, the group currently in middle school will enter the workforce. Whether India’s demographic arithmetic will be a dividend or a burden will be decided, in no small part, in those classrooms today.
The seeds of that mismatch are sown in the middle grades.
Importantly, this failure is not unknown. NEP 2020 clearly mandates experiential, inquiry-based pedagogy. The National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF-SE) 2023 recommends using projects and portfolios for middle-grade assessment. The test itself demands experiential learning. The policy framework for change is in place. We need to redesign the curriculum for adolescent learning and exploration. Bihar shows that large-scale implementation is also possible.
However, PBL is sometimes portrayed as a softer alternative to content mastery. The evidence does not support this. 2023 meta-analysis boundaries in psychologySynthesizing 66 studies, found that it significantly improved academic achievement and higher-order thinking, with the strongest effects in sustained, structured implementation lasting 9 to 18 weeks. Bihar is building exactly the same thing.
But, Bihar’s benefits also make clear the limitations of pedagogy alone.
Improvement in middle grades cannot be considered as a single intervention. It should be conceptualized and implemented as a system-wide redesign – one that aligns financing, staffing, capacity development, school infrastructure (both physical and digital), and curriculum and assessment reforms. Without this alignment, even the most effective educational innovations struggle to stick.
Bihar has benefited under the system with teacher vacancies still exceeding one million at the national level. An important and often under-noted element of this redesign is the availability of qualified subject teachers. As students enter grades 6–8, learning becomes increasingly discipline-specific, requiring teachers with deep content knowledge in areas such as math, science, and languages. Still, the scale of this need does not match the current capacity of the system—or even the ability to accurately diagnose the gap. No pedagogy, no matter how well designed, can fully compensate for a teacher managing 50 children in multiple classrooms.
Assessment reform remains a critical missing piece: unless the Grade 10 board exams measure the abilities and competencies that prepare our children for the future of work, which can be developed through experiential teaching-learning practices, teachers will face systemic pressure to revert to rote learning.
The question is not whether solutions exist, but whether they can be adopted at scale with the required speed and consistency.
Encouragingly, efforts like Shikshagraha are attempting to bring together state institutions, civil society organizations and practitioners to translate this intention into coordinated action to prepare for the future.
India has no dearth of solutions. Bihar has already shown that systems can change within existing institutions and on a large scale.
The question is no longer what works. The point is can we come together, align our systems and act with urgency and intention at the national level in mission mode, so that an entire generation does not go through years of neglect and underpreparedness.
(Views expressed are personal)
This article is written by Khushboo Awasthi, Co-Founder and COO, Shikshalokam and Bindu Thirumalai, Adjunct Faculty, NIAS, Bengaluru.
