PARAKH assessment for India schools: what the national survey is really telling you PARAKH

A Class 9 maths teacher in a Kanpur school opens the morning paper in July 2025 and reads a number that stops her cold: nationally, the average Class 9 maths score is 37 percent, the lowest of any grade surveyed. She is not surprised by the gap — she has watched it form in her own classroom for years — but seeing it stated as a national figure changes the conversation. Suddenly it is not one teacher's worry. It is a measured, country-wide pattern, and her management is now asking what the school is doing about it. The data that triggered this conversation came from PARAKH, and it is reshaping how Indian schools are expected to think about learning.

Here is the plain version: PARAKH is India's national assessment body, and its 2024 survey is the most honest mirror schools have been handed in years. The numbers say learning starts reasonably well in early grades and then thins out badly by Class 9 — and PARAKH's wider mandate means the way every board grades students is about to get more comparable. Schools that read this signal early, and build a simple habit of tracking their own students against it, will be ahead of the ones that treat it as just another government report.

What is PARAKH and what does the assessment do?

PARAKH assessment for India schools sits inside NCERT as an independent unit, set up under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and notified in February 2023. The full name — Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development — is a mouthful, but the job is straightforward: set common standards for how students are assessed across the country. PARAKH is not a single exam. It is a standards body with three jobs, and a school that understands all three will read the headlines far better than one that only sees the survey scores.

What did the Rashtriya Sarvekshan 2024 actually find?

The survey was held on 4 December 2024 and assessed over 21 lakh students from roughly 74,000 schools across 781 districts, in Classes 3, 6 and 9. The results, released in July 2025, tell a clear and uncomfortable story: Indian children start school learning at a workable level and then lose ground as they climb. The national average in language held up at around 64 percent, slightly better than 2021. Maths is where the floor gives way. The average maths score falls from about 57 percent in Class 3 to roughly 37 percent in Class 9 — a near-20-point slide over six years of schooling.

Why should a principal care beyond the headlines?

The survey is a national average. Your school is not an average — it is a specific set of children, in specific sections, with specific weak spots. The value of PARAKH is not the headline percentage; it is the permission and the framework it gives you to ask the same questions of your own data. If the country loses 20 maths points between Class 3 and Class 9, the honest question is whether your school does too, and in which topic the slide begins. Most schools cannot answer that — not because the children are a mystery, but because the marks are trapped in a hundred separate registers and term-end sheets that nobody adds up by competency. That is the gap worth closing, and it is a software-and-habit problem, not a teaching-talent problem.

How should a school respond to PARAKH? A practical framework

You do not need a research department. You need a repeatable routine that turns your own exam marks into the same kind of cohort picture PARAKH produces nationally. Here is the order that works.

1. Map your subjects to competencies, not just chapters. Before the next assessment, agree on the handful of skills each test really measures (two-digit operations, fractions, applying percentages). PARAKH grades skills, so grade yours the same way — otherwise you can never compare.

2. Track every grade against a benchmark. For each class and subject, record your section averages alongside the national figure. When your Class 6 maths average sits below the sub-50 percent national mark, that is a flag you can act on, not a vague worry.

3. Find the grade where your slide begins. Plot the same cohort across years. If your maths average drops sharply between Class 5 and Class 7, that is where to put your best teacher and your remedial time — not uniformly across the school.

4. Name your at-risk students early. Use marks trends to flag children sliding below grade level by topic, while there is still a year to recover, not at the Class 10 pre-board when it is too late.

5. Put the analysis in the teacher's hand. A subject teacher who can see, in two taps, which five students are weak in which competency will re-teach far more precisely than one staring at a column of totals.

6. Prepare for two board exams and equivalence. With CBSE moving to two board exams a year from 2026 and PARAKH standardising how boards grade, your internal assessment data needs to be clean, competency-tagged and ready to export — not reconstructed from registers each March.

7. Brief parents in the same language. Parents now read these headlines too. A school that can show a parent exactly where their child stands by competency builds far more trust than one that hands over a single percentage.

What kinds of tools help schools track this?

Nothing here requires exotic software — it requires an examination and analytics system that thinks in competencies and cohorts rather than just totals. Most Indian school ERPs now carry some form of exam, grade-book and report-card module, and the names you will run into while evaluating include Teachmint, Vidyalaya, Fedena, Entab, MyClassboard, Campus 365 and Edunext. They differ less in whether they store marks and more in whether they can show you a cohort trend, benchmark a section against a target, tag a question to a skill, and put that view in a teacher's phone. When you sit through a demo, push past the marks-entry screen and ask to see the analytics: that is where a PARAKH-aware school actually lives.

What does this cost a school to act on?

For most Indian schools, the honest answer is that the analytics ride along with software you are likely already paying for. A full school ERP in India typically runs between ₹1 lakh and ₹3 lakh per year for a single school, and exam, report-card and analytics features are usually bundled into that, not sold as a separate line. The real cost is rarely the licence — it is the discipline of competency-tagging assessments and the few hours of teacher training to read a trend chart. Schools that already collect fees online know the pattern: the tool is cheap, the habit is the investment. A useful gut-check at the demo stage is to ask whether benchmarking and per-student trend analysis are standard or a premium add-on, because that single answer often explains a price gap between two quotes.

Where Inkwelly fits

Inkwelly is a school management system built for Indian schools, and its examinations and report-card module is designed for exactly this competency-and-cohort view rather than just marks storage. You can record assessments against the skills they test, see a class or section average beside a target, follow a single child's trend across terms to catch a slide early, and hand teachers that view on their own phone. Because the academics and curriculum side sits in the same system, the topics a test covers and the marks it produces stay connected, so your data is clean and export-ready when board equivalence and two-exam cycles arrive. We are not claiming to replace PARAKH or NCERT — the national survey is the benchmark; Inkwelly is simply the place a school keeps its own version of that picture, current and in everyone's hands. It is one honest fit among several, and it is built India-first.

“PARAKH gives the country a mirror once every few years. The schools that pull ahead are the ones that hold the same mirror up to their own children every single term.”

You do not need to overhaul anything to start. Pick one grade and one subject — Class 6 maths is a fair bet given the national findings — and for the next term, record marks against the two or three skills the test really measures, sit your section average beside the sub-50 percent national mark, and watch which students slide. That single experiment, run for one term, tells you more about your school than any government report can, because it is about your children. Do it once, and the habit usually spreads on its own.

See how your school's marks become a learning picture

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