DepEd Secretary Sonny Angara reasserted the department's mission of making every Filipino learner functional literate. This is in the wake of the 2024 Functional Literacy, Education, and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS), which reported that more than 18 million junior high school graduates are categorized as "functional illiterate" or having difficulty in understanding and reading.
We will not let any student fall behind in reading and comprehension. The latest FLEMMS results on functional literacy put emphasis on what we have been recognizing all along literacy has to be the centerpiece of our education reforms," Angara said. He added that providing functional literacy for all Filipino students is a debt of gratitude to the community.
Angara pointed out that the DepEd is aggressively working on this problem to further equip children with what they need for their futures. He made an appeal in favor of public school teachers clamoring for a salary hike. Some of the agency's initiatives include increased remedial and reading programs, plus better teaching and evaluation practices. The emphasis is on the teaching of critical thinking and 21st-century competencies among students, as opposed to mere memorization.
Senate Committee on Basic Education Chair Sherwin Gatchalian earlier reported figures from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), where 79 million people were deemed functionally literate based on the 2019 standards. But with the PSA's new standards for the 2024 FLEMMS, more junior high school graduates are now found to lack comprehension skills.
Under the old FLEMMS implemented up to 2019, an individual was considered functionally literate if he or she could read, write, compute, and understand, or if he or she was at least high school graduates under the old curriculum or junior high school completers under the K to 12 system. Under the 2024 FLEMMS, functional literacy is the capacity to read, write, compute, and understand without taking into consideration high school or junior high school completion.
Gatchalian said, "In the previous definition, we had 79 million constituents who were functionally literate. But with the new definition excluding the completion of high school and junior high school, the number of functionally literates declined to 60 million.". This is a difference of some 18.9 million." He concluded that most graduates of high school and junior high school previously held to be functionally literate according to the old definition no longer qualify under the new criteria.
