Parent’s Assessment of Child’s Learning Abilities and Their School-Based Involvement: Evidence from a Survey of Low Achieving Learners in Uttar Pradesh, India

While India has made significant progress in expanding school enrolment, a major challenge persists in improving children’s learning outcomes. This ongoing learning crisis has led policymakers and development practitioners to call for collective efforts from all stakeholders involved in children’s education. Strengthening social accountability has emerged as a key initiative to addressing this crisis, however, its effectiveness depends largely on how well stakeholders understand the actual learning status of children. Although recent studies have explored teacher’s perceptions of student abilities, there is limited research on how parents assess their children’s reading skills. Additionally, examining who engages in school-parent interactions is crucial to understanding the strength and complexity of the accountability relationship. Our study addresses these gaps by investigating parental perceptions of their children’s learning and school involvement, particularly among low-achieving students in rural Sitapur district, Uttar Pradesh. We use baseline survey data from the “Accountability from the Grassroot” project, led by the Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre, University of Cambridge, and Pratham, India.

Our findings reveal that a significant proportion of parents tend to overestimate their children’s learning abilities, with this overestimation being more prevalent among parents from higher socio-economic backgrounds, who are also more involved with schools. This misalignment or overestimation, possibly driven by a desire to provide socially desirable responses, raises questions about the effectiveness of social accountability- whether these parents, despite being involved, will hold schools and teachers accountable for their children’s lack of learning. In contrast, parents from lower socio-economic backgrounds, who accurately understand their children’s learning, are often less involved with schools may be due to structural barriers and power imbalances, which limits their ability to demand for necessary interventions from school.