School Education Quality Index (SEQI)

Social Issues Education

Context-Recently NITI Aayog has released the first edition of School Education Quality Index (SEQI)

About index

In line with NITI Aayog’s mandate to foster the spirit of competitive and cooperative federalism, SEQI strives to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and best practices across States and UTs. Developed through a collaborative process, including key stakeholders such as Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MHRD), the World Bank and sector experts, the index consists of 30 critical indicators that assess the delivery of quality education. These indicators are categorized as below:

Category	Domain	Number of indicators	Total weight
1. Outcomes	1.1 Learning outcomes and Quality	3	360
	1.2 Access outcomes	3	100
	1.3 Infrastructure & Facilities for Outcomes	3	25
	1.4 Equity Outcomes	7	200
2. Governance Processes Aiding Outcomes	Covering student and teacher attendance, teacher availability, administrative adequacy, training, accountability and transparency	14	280
Total =		30	965

To facilitate a like-for-like comparison, States and UTs have been grouped as Large States, Small States and UTs. Within each of these groups, the indicator values have been appropriately scaled, normalized and weighted to generate an overall performance score and ranking for each State and UT.
SEQI, which used 2016-17 as the reference year and 2015-16 as the base year, was developed to evaluate the performance of states and Union Territories (UTs) in the school education sector.

Key findings

Kerala was placed top among 20 large states of India in terms of quality of school education, followed by Rajasthan and Karnataka, based on the SEQI score
Among eight smaller states, Manipur, Tripura and Goa bagged the top-three positions, respectively, followed by Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh
The overall performance score for the large states ranged from 76.6 percent for Kerala to 36.4 percent for Uttar Pradesh.

Impact

It provides states and UTs with a platform to identify their strengths and weaknesses and undertake requisite course corrections or policy interventions.
In line with the Niti Aayog's mandate to foster the spirit of competitive and cooperative federalism, the index strives to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and best practices across states and UTs.