Under the NIPUN Bharat Mission, Kerala will participate in the Individual Basic Learning Study (FLS) conducted by the Education Department to assess reading, comprehension and numeracy skills.
NIPUN was launched by the Union Government to enable all children at the end of class three to achieve basic education standards by 2026-27. The National Education Policy 2020 assigns the highest priority to the achievement of basic literacy and numeracy.
The FLS 2025-26 will be administered by the national assessment center PARAKH (Performance Assessment, Review and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development) in late February to monitor whether Class III students are on track to achieve the basic Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) targets by 2025-26.
It will also track student progress since a similar FLS held in 2022 to set benchmarks for fluency and comprehension in 20 Indian languages and benchmarks for numeracy.
FLS 2025-26 identifies areas for further focus in policy, interventions and resource allocation by ensuring that outcomes can be compared to the 2022 baseline.
It will be conducted individually and students will be assessed on skills such as speaking/listening comprehension; phonological awareness; decoding letters and words; reading and comprehension; oral reading fluency with comprehension in basic literacy,
This time FLS will include writing assignments that capture a more complete picture of students’ skills.
In basic numeracy, skills in identifying numbers; operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division; word problems; measurement; fractions; patterns; and data handling will be assessed.
Unlike FLS 2022, in which field examiners used an OMR-based format to manually record student responses, this time secure tablet-based applications will be used for real-time recording and faster data processing.
The FLS also provides data for reporting on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.1.1 indicators at the global level. Through policy linkages, it will align assessment procedures with international best practices and benchmarks.
Policy linking has been done for FLS 2022 and the same benchmark will be used for FLS 2025-26 to enable comparable reporting, progress tracking and learning target setting, Samagra Shiksha Kerala officials said.
In 2022, 3,516 students from 380 schools in Kerala participated in FLS. The sample size for the upcoming FLS is unclear at this time.
Unlike the PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan (National Achievement Survey), which monitors system-level learning outcomes at the end of the various academic stages listed in the NEP (grades III, VI and IX) and provides macro-level policy insights, the FLS focuses on grade III and identifies specific learning gaps in basic skills for early interventions.
Published – 03 Dec 2025 21:06 IST
