Is PTR a relevant indicator? What does it tell me?

PTR or the Pupil Teacher ratio essentially tells us how many students are there for each teacher in the school. This is used to assess if there are enough teachers. The recommended norm is 25 students per teacher. Across levels of data aggregation, such as the school, block, district, and state, this norm is fulfilled. However, there are two challenges which this data does not help with.

One, are PTR norms fulfilled by category? For instance, if there are 100 students studying maths across grades, are there enough maths teachers for the same? It may be possible that the school has 150 students with 10 teachers, and a PTR of 15, well within the norm. But 100 students may be studying maths with only 2 maths teachers, so the maths PTR is 50, above the norm.

Second, the issue of multi-grade teaching is a challenge. For instance, the school may have 8 grades with 150 students overall and 6 teachers. Therefore, the PTR is 25, meeting the norm. But each grade may not have a teacher, and students from multiple grades may have to sit in the same classroom, which may not be ideal. Therefore, it is also important to assess the teacher-grade ratio. That is, does every grade have a teacher or not.

Read What useful information can I learn from PTR data? for more.