THE COORDINATING Council of Private Educational Associations (Cocopea) expressed support to the Department of Education amidst alarming data on “functionally illiterate” Junior high school and senior high school graduates.
The 2024 Functional Literacy, Education, and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) revealed that around 18 million Filipino high school graduates are functionally illiterate.
“This support is particularly significant as the DepEd embarks on its reform agenda aimed at enhancing literacy and learning recovery to learning outcomes across all levels of basic education,” Cocopea affirmed.
The association said that the PSA findings serve as a timely reminder that the ongoing learning crisis should be solved in a holistic approach, and a need to implement accountability mechanisms.
“These mechanisms should encompass not only the government, schools, and teachers but also involve learners and their parents in ensuring effective learning outcomes for Filipino students,” it added.
The group reiterated its call during the “ELECTED: A Senatorial Forum for Change” on April 21 that “education must persist as a national priority.”
“Enhancing functional literacy necessitates more than merely promoting access to education; it also involves ensuring, as a national policy, that quality education thrives within the system,” the group stressed.
FLEMMS is a national survey conducted by the PSA to gather data on basic and functional literacy rates and the educational skills of the population.
For 2024, PSA incorporated higher-level comprehension skills into the definition of functional literacy, going beyond the basic reading, writing, and numeracy.
Under the 2019 parameters of the study, a person is considered functionally literate if they can read, write, compute, and comprehend, or at least a high school graduate in the old curriculum, or at least a junior high school completer in the K to 12 curriculum.
Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, chairman of the Senate basic education committee, called on the DepEd to take a “proactive” approach to ensure functional literacy among students.
