Bridging the education gap

MANILA, Philippines - As a culmination of its three-year educator training program, HSBC recognized five outstanding principals who have effectively transformed their elementary schools through the HSBC Principals Leadership Enhancement and Development (LEAD) Program (PLP) last Sept. 12 at Shangri-La Makati.

The five principals were chosen among PLP participants who underwent rigorous training during a series of conferences that tackled leadership, management, professional development and human resource issues.

“We at HSBC are pleased to honor these five remarkable principals who lived up to the PLP mission of making a significant impact on their schools,” says HSBC president and CEO Tony Cripps. “They displayed exemplary leadership and have shown how they can be effective CEOs of their schools in accordance with the best-practice strategies learned from the PLP conference.”

The five honorees were chosen based on their post-program performance as well as their ratings from school visits after attending the PLP conferences. They are Zenaida S. Penafuerte of Rizal Elementary School; Marilyn C. Macalma of Cembo Elementary School; Dr. Elita T. Lopez of Comembo Elementary School; Marciana De Guzman of Nangka Elementary School; and Aurora Marcelino of P. Manalo Elementary School. Cripps, together with Margarita Delgado, president of the Sa Aklat Sisikat Foundation, formally handed out the awards.

The HSBC PLP is the first of its kind in the country and is an undertaking in partnership with SAS, a non-government organization focused on bridging the education gap in the Philippines. Founded by philanthropist Lizzie Zobel and Margarita Delgado in 2001, SAS initially promoted functional literacy and progressive teacher training in collaboration with the Department of Education.

In 2009, SAS together with HSBC launched PLP in response to Republic Act 9155, which gave principals full authority and responsibility for the effective management of their schools. The program aids principals to identify the needs and problems of their schools and community, and equips them with the necessary tools to revise the standard curriculum to address these.

“We believe that as captains of our educational system, principals should be provided with proper resources so they will be able to steer their schools towards becoming innovative learning communities,” says Zobel.

Since the program’s inception, PLP has trained 200 principals from various schools all over the Philippines in three separate batches. It was also through the program that the Principal’s Handbook was developed by SAS and distributed nationwide. The handbook guides principals in their everyday work as community leaders.

Teaching the Philippines

As the PLP conference series draws to a close, HSBC and SAS are bracing for yet another significant undertaking. The Teach for the Philippines (TFP) program is a new program of SAS that HSBC will be supporting. The program will help address the scale and magnitude of the crisis in education in the country by recruiting and training top students from universities and then fielding them in public schools.

HSBC is donating P3 million to TFP — one million from local funds and two million through a grant awarded by the HSBC Global Education Program.

“Our programs with SAS illustrate an effective and sustainable partnership,” says Cripps. “Our programs have continuously evolved — starting with reading programs for students then moving towards educator training and now our aim is to train students to become teachers. We believe that the contribution we make to society through programs like these underpins the success of our business in the long term and we are very excited to highlight our strengthened commitment to education with this new program. “