Rep. Paolo Duterte of Davao City on Thursday pushed for the enactment of education reforms that would effectively address the jobs-skills mismatch in the country and bolster enterprise-based education.
Duterte made the appeals as he underscored the need for Congress to do its part in making Filipino graduates “employment-ready.”
These measures, along with his recently filed bill that seeks to establish early learning programs for indigent pre-kindergarten children, will help lessen the effects of the pandemic-induced education crisis in the country, Duterte said.
Duterte noted that the business sector has already sounded the alarm over the crisis situation in the education sector, which was made worse by the pandemic and the youth’s growing obsession over social media.
“Millions of students that will graduate or have recently graduated from senior high school or college will either get a job that suits their skills or one where they are overqualified or underqualified. But many will still find themselves jobless because their skills are not commensurate to the demands in the job market,” Duterte said.
“This translates into wasted opportunities and lower-than-expected returns on education investments, which negatively affect the productivity and competitiveness of our workforce,” he added.
Two measures already passed by the House of Representative on third and final reading aims to address these concerns—the bill that seeks to institutionalize the country’s enterprise-based education and training program (House Bill 7400) and the bill creating a tripartite council that will be tasked to focus on the jobs-skills mismatch, with the goal of reducing unemployment and underemployment (HB 7370), Duterte said.
The bills, with Duterte as among the principal authors, have been transmitted to the Senate in March this year.
Last week, Management Association of the Philippines (MAP) president Benedicta Du-Baladad expressed alarm over the state of Philippine education today and urged the government to transform the education system to allow it to better adapt to the fast-changing technology-driven employment landscape.
Du-Baladad said public-private partnerships in education will help ensure that graduates are adequately prepared for gainful employment or enterprise building.
Duterte said another step in the right direction is the commitment of his sister, Vice President and concurrent Education Secretary Sara Duterte, to revisit the K-to-12 basic education curriculum to make it relevant in producing competent, job-ready, active and responsible citizens.
According to Duterte, some of MAP’s concerns can be addressed by the passage of HBs 7400 and 7370, while a third congressional measure—HB 8069– will help nip in the bud the learning deficiencies of Filipino children. The bill, which Duterte filed a few weeks before the adjournment of the first congressional session, aims to establish early childhood or pre-kindergarten education programs for indigent Filipino kids.
Investing in pre-kindergarten education has been proven to show concrete improvements in a child’s learning skills, said Duterte, citing a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which revealed that kids who attended one or more years of preschool scored 30 points higher in reading compared to those who did not.]
Duterte also agreed with MAP’s recommendation to make the programs of the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) “future-oriented” to ensure that both teachers and students are constantly upskilled to meet the demands of the labor market.
A 2020 study by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) found that only a little over 20 percent of senior high school (SHS) graduates entered the labor force and over 70 percent continued with their education. The report said that there was a need for government “to re-examine the employment and entrepreneurial objectives of the SHS program.”
Another PIDS study showed that 40 percent of employed Filipinos have academic credentials beyond what is needed in their jobs and that they were only earning 5 percent more for finishing their studies despite being relatively overeducated for their positions.