SC asked to stop DepEd changes to curriculum
A private school teacher on Friday asked the Supreme Court to stop the full implementation in the coming school year of the senior high school (SHS) curriculum that the Department of Education (DepEd) had streamlined from the original four tracks to just two, fearing it could lead to job losses.
Barry Tayam, a SHS teacher at San Beda College Alabang, filed a petition for certiorari that also sought a temporary restraining order (TRO) against the full rollout of the “Strengthened SHS Curriculum” under DepEd’s Memorandum Order No. 12, s. 2026, for incoming Grade 11 students.
According to Tayam, the revised curriculum, which will reduce the 15 core subjects to just five under the original program, could lead to job losses especially among probationary or contractual teachers as they are likely to lose teaching load.
“The education sector cannot be treated as a legal laboratory for trial-and-error policies,” he said in a 24-page petition. “This structural shift directly threatens to diminish my regular teaching load, eliminate my established overload compensation, and drastically reduce my expected income.”
The original tracks under the SHS curriculum were for accountancy, business, and management (ABM); science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), humanities and social sciences (HUMSS), and the general academic (GA) strand.
2 new strands
They will be replaced by two new primary strands—“academic” and “technical-professional”—to be introduced in the next batches of SHS students.
Incoming Grade 12 students, however, will be able to continue their old SHS tracks.
“Logically speaking, the government cannot maintain, let alone promote, a high standard of education while simultaneously eliminating essential learning competencies. Drastically cutting foundational curriculum content inherently undermines the very definition of ‘quality education,’” the petitioner stressed.
Tayam also said the work immersion component covering at least 320 hours, a requirement under the technical-professional strand of the new curriculum, “fails to address the underlying issue of functional literacy.”
“Instead of equipping young learners with the capacity to establish businesses and generate employment, an extended immersion model risks creating a logistical bottleneck. Local industries lack the capacity to absorb an influx of high school interns, forcing them to compete directly against college students who are already struggling to secure mandatory on-the-job training slots,” he said.
‘Grave abuse’
DepEd’s decision to reduce the SHS curriculum strands constitutes “grave abuse of discretion,” the teacher added.
Speaking to reporters on Friday, Tayam also noted that “They declared the pilot testing successful … even without any evaluation, study or recommendations from Edcom II (Second Congressional Commission on Education),” or the body that had conducted a comprehensive review of the basic education program.
Tayam said he hoped that the Supreme Court would issue a resolution on his petition before June 8, the scheduled opening of classes in public schools.
