Publish a Performance Dashboard for Every School

Parents should be able to answer basic questions about a school: Are children learning? Are teachers actually available? Do students attend regularly? Does the school have functioning classrooms, toilets, libraries and laboratories? How much public money does it receive? Is the school improving or declining?

India already collects extensive school-level information through UDISE+. The system covers nearly 15 lakh schools and collects information on students, teachers and school infrastructure, with verification occurring at multiple administrative levels.

The problem is therefore not simply a lack of data. The larger opportunity is to turn existing education data into clear, comparable and publicly useful information about the performance of every school.

Without that transparency, problems can remain hidden inside administrative databases and governments may respond only after schools have been underperforming for years.

India should create a National School Performance Dashboard with a public page for every recognized government and private school.

The dashboard should bring together a small number of meaningful indicators covering student learning and progress, attendance and dropout, teacher availability and vacancies, teacher qualifications, enrolment and retention, infrastructure and facilities, school inspection findings, and—where public funding is involved—funding received and major expenditure categories.

The objective should not be to reduce an entire school to one examination score or league-table ranking.

A school serving disadvantaged children should not automatically appear weaker simply because its students begin at a lower academic level. Wherever possible, the dashboard should distinguish between absolute learning levels and student progress over time.

Information should also show trends:

Current performance → Previous performance → District/State benchmark → National benchmark

That allows parents and administrators to see whether a school is improving rather than looking at one year’s results in isolation.

Data should be presented in plain language, with simple visual indicators rather than requiring parents to interpret government spreadsheets.

Each school page should also show the results of independent school inspections proposed elsewhere in the India We Deserve education framework, including whether the school:

Meets Standard → Improvement Required → Has Critical Deficiencies

The dashboard should become an accountability tool for government as well. If a school has teacher vacancies, poor infrastructure or inadequate funding, the public should be able to see not only the deficiency but also who is responsible for correcting it and whether it has been corrected.

Individual student and teacher information should remain private. The dashboard should publish aggregated institutional performance, not personal records.
The accountability cycle becomes:

Measure → Publish → Compare → Identify problems → Assign responsibility → Correct → Measure again

England provides a useful example of making school-level performance information publicly accessible.

The UK government’s Compare School and College Performance service allows parents and the public to search individual schools and compare information including examination and test results, pupil absence and financial information. England’s primary-school performance data also includes school workforce and pupil-population information.

The information is useful not only to parents. The UK Department for Education explicitly identifies school leaders, governors, local authorities, government agencies and inspectors among the users of school-performance information for evaluation, accountability and school improvement.

England also maintains a more detailed secure Analyse School Performance system for education professionals, allowing school leaders, local authorities and inspectors to examine attainment and progress—including results for disadvantaged students and students with special educational needs.

India already possesses much of the underlying data infrastructure through UDISE+. The reform is to connect school data, learning outcomes, inspection findings and funding information and turn them into an understandable public performance record for every school.

Collecting data tells government what is happening. Publishing it tells everyone—and creates pressure to do something about it.

Every parent should be able to see how their child’s school is performing, and every government should be able to see which schools need help before another generation of children passes through them.