Iloilo's Department of Education (DepEd) is sounding the alarm after a national survey disclosed that more than 18 million Filipino graduates of junior and senior high school in 2024 are unable to read or understand basic text eliciting cries for education strategy reforms with a sense of urgency.
The statistics, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) in a hearing at the Senate on April 30, came from the 2024 Functional Literacy, Education, and Mass Media Survey, which revealed further that 24.8 million Filipinos aged 10 to 64 are functionally illiterate and 5.8 million are essentially illiterate.
Dr. Nestor Pingil, DepEd-Iloilo Curriculum and Teaching Division chief education supervisor, recognized the seriousness of the situation, describing the department as finding the information alarming and calling for action. We are viewing it as a challenge. In DepEd, we have done what we ought to have done, but due to the PSA data, we must review and revisit our practices and our teaching contexts", he added.
Functional illiteracy, as the PSA defines it, is the inability of a person to read, write, compute, and understand more than basic skills. Basic literacy, meanwhile, is confined to reading and writing simple messages.
Based on the report, the Senate has pressed DepEd to roll out alternative learning systems specific to poor-performing students with below-average comprehension capabilities, and to study deeper socioeconomic factors like malnutrition and poverty that might be jeopardizing student performance.
Although the DepEd-Iloilo did not release localized results, the overall national trend convinced regional education officers to reevaluate teaching practices and support mechanisms in order to head off further deterioration in learning.
The test results follow in the wake of previous international comparisons that ranked the Philippines at the bottom of the list in terms of reading and comprehension scores, confirming widespread opinion regarding the Philippines' basic education quality.
