Using Your School’s Data to Actually Improve Your School: UDISE+, ASER and What the Numbers Tell You

Using Your School’s Data to Actually Improve Your School

A contributing voice from school practice | Specialist in curriculum, pedagogy, and school leadership

Government schools generate large amounts of data, enrolment, attendance, examination results, and most of it is submitted upward and never used downward for school improvement. Research referenced in earlier work this session found the specific mechanism behind this: India’s Performance Grading Index, built from 73 indicators drawn substantially from UDISE+ data, reports results at state and district level only, meaning a school that supplies the underlying numbers typically receives no equivalent report back showing where its own school sits against those same indicators. The data genuinely exists. The loop back to the school that produced it is the part that’s usually missing.

Key facts

• India’s UDISE+ system, one of the largest education datasets in the world, collects data from roughly 1.47 million schools, 9.8 million teachers, and over 200 million students annually, referenced in earlier research this session, a genuinely enormous, functioning data infrastructure, not a hypothetical resource.
• The Performance Grading Index (PGI) 2.0 turns this data into 73 indicators covering learning outcomes, access, infrastructure, and governance, real, substantive analysis, but reports results at state and district level only, not to individual schools, meaning a school’s own data feeds the system without that school receiving an equivalent report back.
• Reporting from Careers360, referenced in earlier work this session, found teachers routinely managing five or more separate data-entry portals, UDISE+, attendance systems, DIKSHA, mid-day meal tracking, training platforms, real time spent producing data that largely doesn’t return to the school in usable form.
• A separate 2023 example, also referenced earlier this session, showed UDISE+ data being used publicly to dispute a state’s dropout figures rather than to inform any specific school’s own improvement, illustrating the pattern directly: the same dataset gets used to argue about schools more often than to help any individual one of them.

The fix is specific: close the loop, don’t just add more data collection

A headteacher who spends an hour after the bell entering data into five different portals should, at minimum, get something back from at least one of them. The evidence points toward requesting existing reports, not building new dashboards, since much of the relevant analysis, PGI’s 73 indicators, for instance, already exists; it simply isn’t routed back to the school level by default.

This distinction matters directly for how a headteacher should approach this problem. Building an entirely new, parallel school-level data system is a much larger undertaking than requesting that existing, already-computed analysis be shared. Since the underlying data collection infrastructure and much of the analysis already exists, the most direct path to genuinely data-informed improvement is closing the existing loop, requesting the reports that are already being generated somewhere in the system, rather than starting a new data collection effort from scratch.

Five principles for actually using your school’s data

1. Diagnose which specific reports already exist somewhere in the system but haven’t been routed to your school. Since PGI already computes 73 indicators from data your school likely already supplies, the first step is finding out what already exists before building anything new.
2. Request existing reports directly and specifically, through your CRC or BRC, rather than assuming the system will offer them proactively. Given the documented pattern of data flowing up without a built-in return path, a specific, standing request is more likely to work than waiting for the system to change its default behaviour.
3. Build protected, recurring time for teachers to actually review and interpret whatever school-level data you do obtain, together. Data that arrives but is never discussed or used to inform a specific instructional decision is functionally the same as data that never arrived; the review and interpretation step is where the actual improvement value gets created.
4. Distinguish data collected for compliance from data genuinely useful for improvement, and prioritise requesting the second. Given how much of the current data-entry burden is compliance-oriented, per the Careers360 reporting, deliberately seeking out the subset that’s actually diagnostically useful, rather than treating all data entry as equally valuable, is a more efficient use of limited time.
5. Start with your own school’s most recent submitted data as a diagnostic tool, requested and reviewed directly, rather than waiting for a new report format or dashboard to be built specifically for schools.

Frequently asked questions

Does the data schools submit to the government actually get analysed, or does it just sit unused? It genuinely gets analysed, that’s part of the problem worth understanding precisely: the Performance Grading Index turns this data into 73 real indicators, but reports the results at state and district level only, not back to the individual schools that supplied the underlying numbers.

Is the fix to this problem building new school-level data systems, or something simpler? Something simpler and more direct, per the evidence: since much of the relevant analysis already exists in systems like PGI, requesting that existing reports be shared with the school, rather than building a new, parallel data system, is a more achievable and more evidence-consistent first step.

How much of the current data burden on schools and teachers is actually returning any value to those same schools? Documented reporting found teachers managing five or more separate data-entry portals, much of it oriented toward compliance rather than school-level improvement use, meaning a meaningful share of current data effort produces limited direct return to the school generating it.

What’s the single most useful first step a headteacher can take this week? Making a specific, direct request through your CRC or BRC for an existing report, such as your school’s standing in PGI’s indicator framework, rather than waiting for the system to offer this proactively or attempting to build a new data tool from scratch.

What to do:

1. Identify which one of the five-plus portals your school reports into is most likely to already generate a report relevant to your school, and write down one specific request you will make this week to obtain it, not a general improvement, but a named action.
2. Search DIKSHA or ask your Block Resource Coordinator directly whether your school’s PGI-relevant indicators can be shared back with you specifically. If nothing is available, note that gap; the absence of an accessible report is itself useful information.
3. Spend five minutes this week reviewing your school’s most recently submitted UDISE+ data for any specific figure that surprises you or that you hadn’t previously examined closely, not entering data, just reviewing what you’ve already submitted.
4. Tell one colleague about the specific finding that PGI’s 73 indicators are computed but not routed back to individual schools, and discuss whether your school has ever specifically requested this analysis.
5. At the end of the week, ask yourself what specific report or data point you obtained this week that you didn’t have before, and what you would look at next.

Note on sourcing: web search was unavailable during this session, so current, specific statistics could not be verified live. The UDISE+ scale figures, PGI 2.0’s indicator structure and reporting level, the Careers360 reporting on teacher data-entry burden, and the 2023 dispute example all draw on research conducted earlier in this same working session, not new fabrication. A reader preparing this for publication should verify current, specific figures before treating them as fully sourced.

Support resources: NIPUN Bharat FLN assessment tools (via your state SCERT or DIET); NCERT teacher guides; Azim Premji Foundation open-access research; DIKSHA platform content in 36 languages; Tele-MANAS mental health helpline: 14416 or 1800-891-4416; CHILDLINE: 1098.