MANILA, Philippines — Vice President Sara Duterte, who is also education secretary, acknowledged on Monday that most senior high school graduates since 2016 struggled to find employment without a college or university education.
Only a little more than 10% of senior high school graduates landed a job, while 83% continued on to higher education, according to the National Senior High School tracer study included in the DepEd’s Basic Education Report (BER), which discussed the state of education in the country.
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"The K-12 curriculum promised to produce graduates that are employable. That promise remains a promise," Duterte said.
Even though the senior high program has contributed to a high 90% passing rate in the national certificate assessment of the Technical Education And Skills Development Authority, Duterte said that few employers have been willing to hire senior high graduates who have undergone work immersion.
"Industry partners have expressed concern that the time allotment for work immersion is only for familiarization and not for actual skills acquisition," Duterte said.
The K to 12 program, which introduced two additional years of high school in 2016, replaced the old curriculum with one designed to qualify students for employment even without a college degree.
Ongoing K to 12 review reveals congested curriculum
The ongoing review of the K to 12 program has so far found a curriculum that was overstuffed with content and yet missing several prerequisites for essential learning competencies, Duterte said.
A number of these learning competencies also required "high cognitive demands" from students — a finding that previously appeared in the DepEd’s Basic Education Development Plan (BEDP) 2030, the agency’s first long-term plan to improve the quality of education.
A commissioned study cited in DepEd’s BEDP found that the K to 12 curriculum was "more demanding in terms of the number of learning competencies than Australia, Canada and Singapore" before it was downsized during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Duterte also said that "the assessment on K-12 curriculum revealed the weak teaching methods of our teachers in addressing 21st-century skills."
"Studies done by the Research Center for Teacher Quality, the World Bank, and UNICEF showed that teachers need further support, particularly in explicitly and strategically teaching critical thinking and problem-solving skills," Duterte added.
Duterte said DepEd will revise the K to 12 curriculum to make it more "relevant to produce competent, job-ready, active and responsible citizens."
Among the revisions being eyed is reducing the number of learning areas in early grade education (Kinder to Grade 3) from seven to five to focus on improving students’ literacy and numeracy.
DepEd is targeting to finish its review of the senior high school curriculum by June 2023. It finished its K to 12 curriculum for Kinder to Grade 10 in September.
Duterte also said that DepEd will implement evidence-based programs to improve students’ skills in reading, science and mathematics — subjects where Filipino students scored the lowest (reading) and second lowest (math and science) globally in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
PISA assessed the reading, science and mathematics competencies of 15-year-old students from 79 countries.
The 2018 National Achievement Test results also showed that only an alarming 2.8% of Grade 12 students were considered proficient at math, which was included in the education portion of the Philippine Development Plan 2023 - 2028, the government’s economic roadmap.