Accountability for learning in contexts of fragile school attendance in India

Accountability-focused governance reforms aiming to address the ‘learning crisis’ in schools across the global South have generated a performative orientation that diverts from a sustained focus on student learning. How education system actors perceive accountability for ensuring that all enrolled children attend school and learn even if children’s attendance is irregular remains a critical question which this paper addresses. A global scholarly preoccupation with enrolment and absence that is inattentive to student attendance and its relationship with accountability for learning is first identified. The empirical investigation focuses on India, where despite near universal enrolment, the average rate of primary school attendance is about 70 per cent. Field sites are three government-run elementary schools, with poor material conditions, in the Adivasi region of southern Rajasthan. The paper first disaggregate the rates of learner attendance the schools report and identifies distinct temporal patterns which are captured in a typology. This is applied in a qualitative investigation of accountability for learning that uses student attendance patterns as a prism. It finds that while teachers holds themselves to account for delivering teaching, differing learner attendance patterns elicit different responses from teachers, such that teacher accountability does not extend to enabling good quality learning opportunities for all students. It shows that teacher and parent views of accountability for ensuring that children attend regularly are misaligned. The conclusion summarises the evidence-based learning for policy and argues that promoting systemic accountability for learning requires a firmer focus on the attendance – learning relationship in general, and ‘fragile’ attendance in particular, in both India and other global South country contexts. • The relationship between student attendance and learning at school is under-researched in the global South. • India’s accountability-focused reforms encourage a performative accountability that undermines a focus on student learning. • Disaggregating rates into patterns of attendance yields a typology that informs analysis of attendance – learning relations. • Student attendance patterns shape teacher accountability for learning, with least accountability for the most fragile • Fragile attendance helps explain why pedagogical routines of homework, content delivery and rote learning persist in India.