There is a figure that should unsettle every policymaker who believes India’s best days lie ahead. It is not the fiscal deficit or its demographic dividend. It is this: In Grades 6, 7, and 8, the middle years of schooling, when adolescent minds are at their most cognitively plastic—most capable of learning, adapting, and forming lifelong pathways—the national average score in mathematics is only about 37%. In science, the performance is only marginally better.
This is not a new finding. The National Achievement Survey of 2021 clearly established it. The PARAKH 2024 assessment confirmed it. What is striking is not the data itself, but the muted response it has provoked. India has rightly built a national conversation around foundational literacy and numeracy. The NIPUN Bharat mission mobilised extraordinary administrative energy to ensure every child can read and do basic arithmetic by Grade 3, and ASER 2024 documents a genuine, if partial, recovery in early-grade learning. This is worth celebrating.
Even while the foundational floor is rising, the middle stage continues to act as a ceiling. With 6.3 crore children currently enrolled in Grades 6–8, this ceiling matters enormously. In a country where fertility has declined to ~1.9, and the share of young children is shrinking, the pressure point in the system has shifted upward. In the next five years, children aged 11–14 will comprise nearly 8–9% of India’s population, i.e. over 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 sustained cohort through the middle years, where the pathway to secondary education is either secured or silently 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 developing disciplinary thinking, building habits of mind, and understanding how knowledge is organised and applied—making it essential that teaching balances structure, engagement, and adolescent developmental needs. Effective pedagogy must, therefore, move beyond rote learning to cultivate disciplinary thinking, helping students think like practitioners in each subject. Approaches such as inquiry-based learning, problem-solving, modelling expert thinking, discussion, collaborative work, and formative assessment are key to ensuring this large cohort not only stays in school, but learns meaningfully.
Encouragingly, this ceiling 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, a large-scale shift in classroom practice is already showing what improvement at this stage can look like.
Between 2022 and 2024, the state introduced Project-Based Learning (PBL) across Grades 6–8 for Science and Maths. SCERT co-designed learning materials, DIET-led teacher training was rolled out, Block Resource Persons supported peer learning, and ongoing mentoring sustained implementation. The programme reached 40 lakh students across 28,000 schools.
The results, evaluated by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), are striking. Mathematics scores rose from 43.74% to 52.33% at endline; Science from 43.25% to 52.33%, a combined average improvement of 8.84 percentage points. Students in Grades 7 and 8 made roughly two years of learning progress in a single year. The percentage of teachers actively implementing PBL rose from 50% to 95%. Teachers have also begun observing meaningful changes in students’ 21st-century skills—an aspect that the National Institute of Advanced Studies will formally measure in the year ahead.
This is not a small pilot whose results might not survive scale. It offers a clear indication of what system-led change and design for scale can achieve, and, by contrast, 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. Enrolment ratios at the middle level have risen to over 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 Bihar experience clarifies what the system is currently missing. Across multiple assessments, the gap is not just in content, but in capability. PARAKH 2024 shows students struggle with data interpretation, scientific reasoning, communication, and practical application, the very competencies that project-based learning attempts to build.
This gap is not accidental. Classroom practice continues to be shaped by an over-reliance on rote instruction, where memorisation substitutes for understanding. While this can produce short-term gains, it rarely builds the ability to apply knowledge in unfamiliar contexts. Global evidence—from the World Economic Forum to the OECD—consistently highlights that the most critical skills for the future of work are analytical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, and the ability to learn continuously. These are not skills that emerge from rote learning or early-grade instruction alone. They are built when young adolescents begin to question, connect ideas, work with others, and apply knowledge to real-world contexts.
The International Labour Organisation’s India Employment Report 2024 documents a skills gap affecting 30–40% of the workforce. Youth aged 15–29 account for 83% of India’s unemployed. India’s demographic window begins to close around 2040, roughly 15 years away. The cohort currently in middle school will enter the workforce as this window narrows. Whether India’s demographic arithmetic becomes a dividend or a burden will be decided, in no small part, in those classrooms today.
The seeds of that mismatch are planted in the middle grades.
Importantly, this failure is not unrecognised. NEP 2020 explicitly mandates experiential, inquiry-based pedagogy. The National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF-SE) 2023 recommends using projects and portfolios for middle-grade assessment. PARAKH itself calls for experiential learning. The policy architecture for change exists. We need to redesign the curriculum for adolescent learning and exploration. Bihar demonstrates that implementation at scale is also possible.
However, PBL is sometimes caricatured as a soft alternative to content mastery. The evidence does not support this. A 2023 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology, synthesising 66 studies, found that it significantly improved academic achievement and higher-order thinking, with the strongest effects in sustained, structured implementations lasting 9 to 18 weeks. Bihar is building exactly that.
But, Bihar’s gains also clarify the limits of pedagogy alone.
Reform in the middle grades cannot be treated as a single intervention. It must be conceptualised and executed as a system-wide redesign—one that aligns financing, staffing, capacity development, school infrastructure (both physical and digital), and curricular and assessment reforms. Without this alignment, even the most effective pedagogical innovations struggle to sustain.
Bihar’s gains occurred within a system still carrying over one million teacher vacancies nationally. A critical, and often under-addressed, element of this redesign is the availability of qualified subject teachers. As students transition into Grades 6–8, learning becomes increasingly discipline-specific, requiring teachers with deeper content knowledge in areas such as mathematics, science, and languages. Yet, the scale of this requirement is not matched by the system’s current capacity—or even its ability to accurately diagnose the gap. No pedagogy, however well-designed, fully compensates for a teacher managing 50 children across multiple grades.
Assessment reform remains the critical missing piece: until the Grade 10 Board examination measures the capacities 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 instruction.
The question, then, is not whether solutions exist, but whether they can be adopted at scale with the speed and consistency required.
Encouragingly, efforts such as Shikshagraha are attempting to bring together state institutions, civil society organisations, and practitioners to translate this intent into coordinated action towards future readiness
India does not lack solutions. Bihar has already shown that systems can shift within existing institutions and at scale.
The question is no longer what works. It is whether we can come together, align our systems and act—with urgency and intent—at a national level in mission mode, so that an entire generation does not pass through the middle years unseen and underprepared.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Khushboo Awasthi, co-founder & COO, ShikshaLokam and Bindu Thirumalai, adjunct faculty, NIAS, Bengaluru.
