While every graduation season ought to be marked by celebration, this school year in particular is important for the education sector. The year 2018 welcomes the first batch of senior high school graduates as part of the landmark K to 12 program, first implemented in school year 2016-2017.
As with any paradigm-shifting reform of such scale, the addition of two more years in the basic education system became the subject of intense debate, from the added burden it poses on parents to the promised value that it gives to education. One of the program’s goals is to prepare students for employment or careers as a viable option from the traditional default of moving on to college.
Upon implementation, with the expected glitches aside, the initial signs were encouraging. The Department of Education expected some 700,000 enrollees in the new Grade 11, but more than 1.5-million students actually turned up. And two years later, more than 1.2-million graduated, an encouraging proportion, all things considered.
Moreover, the transition rate from Grades 10 to 11 was at a remarkable 93 percent, a far cry from the transition rate of fourth year high school graduates to college, which was consistently below the 50-percent level.
For its part, DepEd had succeeded in helping make the transition to K to 12 as painless for stakeholders as it could. It has provided either free or highly subsidized senior high school education to more than 2.7-million learners in both public and private schools for the school year 2017-2018 alone. It supplemented the already-free public school system with more subsidies of up to P21.57 million in the same period.
A big chunk of these subsidies went to the agency’s Senior High School Voucher Program in private schools, state universities and colleges, and local universities and colleges, while the rest allowed students in the Technical-Vocational-Livelihood Track to take their specialization subjects in private partner institutions.
This aspect is important as this first batch of senior high graduates, as envisioned, especially the 38 percent in the Tech-Voc track, have already gained significant workplace exposure by the time they finish, giving them a definite edge over contemporaries who didn’t go through the SHS system.
Theirs is also an incomparable opportunity to continue working for the companies where they had work immersion, which in turn also benefit via a directly trained and tested talent pool. Another option, of course, is entrepreneurship, a track that the system hopefully democratized, and is now no longer limited to students who could take a business course in college. Students are also better equipped to transition to higher education should they wish—with a gamut of specialized subjects that had prepared them for more rigorous study.
Other encouraging signs abound: school year 2016-2017 saw a remarkable increase in Balik-Aral Enrolment, indicative of invigorated interest of junior high school completers to go back to school and finish a senior high track. The Alternative Learning Systems program also attracted former dropouts to go back to school through the Accreditation and Equivalency Test. All these are because the senior high tracks represented a clear route toward gainful employment.
Thus, this synergy between the education sector and industry, at its most fundamental sense, already bodes well for this program. After all, one of the enduring ills that K to 12 aims to address is the chronic job mismatch that has plagued the country’s educational system for decades.
But this challenge is a collective responsibility, not only government’s. It is high time to support the call of the Department of Education, through Secretary Leonor M. Briones, for all stakeholders to sustain the support and strengthen sectoral coordination in order to address challenges in job creation and matching.
She said: “The responsibility of improving the employability of SHS graduates, and their life options in general, is not solely on DepEd; if it takes a village to raise a child, then it takes strong partnership and strategic coherence of both public and private sectors to develop and recognize our graduates’ competencies, and to enable them to become the productive and effective nation builders that we envision them to be.”
Possible areas of coordination include curriculum development, student training and immersion, market signaling and information, human resources planning, and research and extension, among others.
“We are doing [K to 12] to be able to compete in our own country so that we can equip our learners with appropriate skills, creativity, and intelligence to cope with the changing world,” Secretary Briones said.
Yet, while the K to 12 system is certainly the boldest reform in the country’s education system, more challenges must be addressed. A week or so before classes resume, DepEd Undersecretary Jesus Mateo acknowledged that the agency will continue improving the teacher-to-student ratio. It’s currently hiring a total of 75,000 new teachers from kinder to senior high, in addition to the 35,000 it hired last year alone.
“Ang layunin ng ating kalihim ay pababain ang class size, because students should enjoy their learning environment,” Mateo said.
As we begin another school year, we should congratulate DepEd for a job well done—all things considered—and continue to rally behind it. Its nationwide Brigada Eskwela program, for instance, is a prelude to welcoming some 27-million students anew. And similar to a community that comes together from different sectors and organizations to clean our public schools, we should show the same support and enthusiasm for a reform like the K to 12 program.