Angara underscores need for education reforms centered on literacy

Education Secretary Sonny Angara on Thursday reaffirmed the Department of Education’s (DepEd) commitment to ensure that every learner in the country is functionally literate.

This, as results of the 2024 functional literacy, education and mass media survey (FLEMMS) revealed that there are over 18 million junior high school graduates who are considered “functional illiterate” or those who have problems in comprehension and understanding.

“Hindi namin hahayaang may batang nahuhuli sa pagbasa at pag-unawa [we will not let any learner fall behind in reading and comprehension]. The recent FLEMMS results on functional literacy highlight what we have long recognized—literacy must be at the heart of our education reforms,” Angara said in a statement.

“Ensuring that every Filipino learner is functionally literate is a commitment we owe to our constituents,” he added.

Angara said that the DepEd has been taking action to address the issue in order to prepare the children for a better future.

Among the agency’s interventions are intensifying remedial and literacy programs and the use of data in schools. He said teaching and assessment methods have also been improved, and the students are being honed to be critical thinkers and have 21st-century skills, instead of merely memorizing lessons.

Senate basic education committee chairman Sherwin Gatchalian earlier disclosed the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) data which showed that 79 million constituents were considered functional literate under the 2019 parameters of the study.

But with the PSA revising the new parameters to consider an individual as a functional literate under the 2024 FLEMMS, more junior high school graduates are now detected to be unable to comprehend.

In the FLEMMS that was conducted until 2019, a person is considered functional literate if he can read, write, compute, and comprehend, or at least high school graduate in the old curriculum or at least junior high school completer in the K to 12 curriculum.

But for the 2024 FLEMMS, the PSA has revised the definition of functional literate as someone who can read, write, compute, and comprehend.

“In the old definition… we have 79 million constituents who are considered functional literate. But in the current definition, which you removed high school and junior high school, the number of functional literacy or literate went down to 60 million constituents. So, that’s a difference of about 18.9 million,” Gatchalian said.

“So in other words, there are high school graduates and junior high school graduates who were in the old definition considered automatically as functional literate but in the new definition…they did not pass the new definition of functional literacy,” he concluded. —VAL, GMA Integrated News