The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) is a concept and a large-scale, citizen-led, household survey that provides reliable estimates of children's schooling status and basic learning levels in rural India. It is conducted annually by the non-governmental organization Pratham. ASER was first conducted in 2005. It was created to solve the problem of a lack of independent, large-scale data on actual learning outcomes, moving beyond official statistics that primarily focused on enrollment figures.
The survey mechanism assesses children in the age group of 3 to 16. The core assessment measures the ability of children aged 5 to 16 to read a simple paragraph or story and perform basic arithmetic, typically at the Class II to Class V level. The survey covers almost all rural districts in India. ASER is closely connected to the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, as its findings provide independent data on the quality of education, which is a key goal of the Act. It also connects to the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, particularly its emphasis on achieving Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN).
The report has changed recently, adapting to external circumstances; for instance, the ASER 2020 and ASER 2021 reports were phone-based due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The ASER 2022 report, a full-scale survey conducted after a four-year gap, highlighted a significant increase in government school enrollment compared to 2018. However, the ASER 2022 findings also showed a drop in children's basic reading and arithmetic abilities compared to pre-pandemic levels, underscoring the impact of school closures.