Centre for South Asian Studies

Description

This paper argues that in India’s accounting of progress towards universal elementary education, policy discourses have created an in- or out-of-school binary that obscures a necessary focus on learner attendance. Alerted to this by previous work on education system accountability, we are currently investigating interrupted learning and fragile attendance in the Adivasi (tribal) belt of Southern Rajasthan. The research adopts a multi-scalar, qualitative process tracing approach that is anchored around attendance monitoring at the school level, in three government elementary schools (Grades 1-8). We show that cumulative attendance figures are fed from the school into the State’s education system management in a performance of attendance monitoring that informs state incentive schemes, but does not extend to scrutinising trends of attendance from a learning perspective. By analysing learners’ presence and absence we propose a typology that demonstrates the diversity of attendance, and we report on how teachers ‘see’ attendance and their responses to its differing forms. Our findings trouble the notion of the ‘regular child’ in policy discourses, with their focus on retention and drop-out, and highlight the importance of critically ‘registering’ attendance and its implications for learning.