A congressman who serves as one of the commissioners of the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2) is advocating for increased funding for curriculum and teaching practices to enhance the functional literacy of the country.
Talking to the press Sunday evening, Tingog Partylist Rep. Jude Acidre said 60 percent of the basic education budget should be allocated to improve curriculum and teaching to elementary and high school students. "Those areas should be our priority. We have been requesting the Department of Education (DepEd) to investigate it. I believe DepEd is moving in that direction", says Acidre, who is among five EDCOM 2 members from the House of Representatives.
In the 2025 General Appropriations Act, PHP734.18 billion out of the PHP1.055 trillion budget for education is for DepEd, the agency responsible for coming up with, implementing, and coordinating policies, plans, programs and projects in formal and non-formal basic education.
DepEd reports that basic education institutions received a PHP36.81 billion budget, basic education curriculum received a PHP3.69 billion allocation, and early language literacy and numeracy received PHP106.23 million. Acidre stressed the need to pay greater attention to basic education following the April 30 Senate Committee on Basic Education hearing that discovered around 18 million Filipinos who are graduates of the nation's basic education system may be functionally illiterate.
This is according to data from the Functional Literacy, Education, and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) done by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) in the latter half of 2024.
The PSA identifies functional literacy as the capacity of an individual to read, write, compute, and understand. Aside from fundamental literacy skills, functional literacy embodies a higher degree of comprehension skills, like the integration of two or more components of information and the drawing of inferences from the information provided.
The FLEMMS report also revealed that the Northern Samar province is 4th in the nation, with 48 percent of secondary graduates who are functionally illiterate. Another province is Samar, which has 46 percent functional illiteracy, the 7th highest in the nation. The two provinces are among the poorest in the Eastern Visayas region in 2023, as per PSA.
"Poverty is a very easy excuse, but there is always a mechanism. Even though we are a poor area, we have been graduating good graduates in the last years. It's about managing education programs at the classroom level", Acidre added.
Committed under Republic Act 11899, which became a law lapsed on July 23, 2022, EDCOM 2 is also charged with doing a national review of the nation's education sector. The commission is composed of 10 legislators, with five each from the Senate and House of Representatives. The body is headed by four co-chairpersons with six commissioners.
