Pinoy pupils’ skills continue to decline

Proficiency rates among young Filipino learners have dropped as they advance through the country’s education system from Grade 3 to Grade 12, the government body tasked to supervise the entire education sector announced over the weekend.

The Second Congressional Commission on Education (Edcom 2) said data from the Department of Education’s (DepEd) from 2023 to 2025 show that 70 percent of learners “continue to struggle with foundational skills” at the third grade.

“This includes recognizing letters and sounds, reading common words, understanding short passages, counting on their own, or doing simple numerical problem-solving,” the commission said.

Findings from the Early Language, Literacy and Numeracy Assessment in 2024 showed that only a third of Grade 3 learners (30.52 percent) were considered “proficient” or “highly proficient.”

By the time students reach Grade 6, the Edcom, citing the 2024 National Achievement Test, said that proficiency drops by 11 percentage points to just 19.56 percent, meaning that only one in five students were considered “proficient.”

As they reach high school, the rates decline dramatically, with only 1.36 percent reaching “at least proficient” in Grade 10, and 0.4 percent at least proficient by Grade 12, meaning that only 14 in every 1,000 students at Grade 10 and four in every 1,000 at Grade 12 “can demonstrate skills such as problem solving, managing and communicating information, and analyzing and evaluating data to create or formulate ideas.”

“This steep trajectory of underperformance is rooted in a failure to master foundational competencies during the earliest years of schooling,” the Edcom said, adding that its findings indicate that nearly half of learners are “not reading at their respective grade levels by the end of Grade 3.”

The commission described this as a “disadvantage that hardens into a learning gap” of 5.5 years by the time a student reaches age 15.

“Because literacy is the essential gateway to numeracy and all other subjects, students who fall behind early find it increasingly impossible to comprehend more complex curricula in higher grades,” it also said.

Lower baseline

The DepEd data also showed that the proportion of students who are considered “proficient” to “highly proficient” begins at a “low baseline,” therefore becoming “negligible by the time they reach high school.”

The commission mentioned DepEd Order No. 55, series of 2016, which was issued nearly 10 years ago, mandating the department to conduct system-level assessments by key stage to monitor the entire basic education system.

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They will assess the effectiveness of education service delivery and the assessments will be administered to a representative sample of learners around the country to determine whether the students are able to meet the learning standards of the current curriculum.

Under the department order, students who score at least 75 percent are deemed “proficient” or “highly proficient,” while those who score 50 to 74 percent are considered “nearly proficient.”

Students who scored lower than 50 percent, meanwhile, are either “low proficient” or “not proficient.”

A study by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, commissioned by the Edcom, revealed that when the standard is used to determine all cut-off scores for proficiency, more students could be considered below the DepEd standard.

“This indicates that the 75 percent passing mark may be too high to realistically define ‘proficiency,’” the Edcom said.