Kerala will take part in a one-on-one foundational learning study (FLS) conducted by the Ministry of Education to gauge proficiency in reading and comprehension and numeracy as part of the NIPUN Bharat Mission.
NIPUN was launched by the Union government with the aim of enabling all children at the end of grade III to achieve foundational learning standards by the year 2026-27. The National Education Policy 2020 accords the highest priority to achievement of foundational literacy and numeracy.
FLS 2025-26 will be conducted by the PARAKH (Performance Assessment, Review and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development) national assessment centre towards the end of February to monitor whether class III students are on track to achieve foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) targets by 2025-26.
It will also track students’ progress since a similar FLS was held in 2022 to establish reading proficiency benchmarks for fluency and comprehension in 20 Indian languages and proficiency benchmarks for numeracy.
The FLS 2025-26 will identify areas that need further focus in policy, interventions, and resource allocation by ensuring that the results can be benchmarked against the 2022 baseline.
It will be individually administered and students will be assessed in skills such as oral language comprehension/listening comprehension; phonological awareness; decoding letter and words; reading and comprehension; oral reading fluency with comprehension in foundational literacy,
This time, the FLS will include writing tasks to capture a more holistic picture of students’ skills.
In foundational numeracy, skills in number identification; operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division; word problems; measurements; fractions; patterns; and data handling will be assessed.
Unlike FLS 2022 in which a OMR-based format was used by field investigators to manually record student responses, this time secure tablet-based applications will be utilised for real-time recording and faster data processing.
FLS also provides data to report on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.1.1 indicators at the global level. It will align assessment practices with international best practices and benchmarks through policy linking.
Policy linking was done for FLS 2022 and the same benchmark will be used for FLS 2025-26 to enable comparable reporting, tracking progress, and setting learning targets, Samagra Shiksha Kerala officials said.
In 2022, 3,516 students from 380 schools in Kerala had taken part in the FLS. The sample size for the upcoming FLS is unclear at this point of time.
Unlike the PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan (National Achievement Survey) that monitors system-level learning outcomes at the end of various academic stages mentioned in the NEP (grades III, VI, and IX) and provides macro-level policy insights, FLS focusses on grade III and identifies specific learning gaps in foundational skills for early interventions.
Published – December 03, 2025 09:06 pm IST
