Education deprivation affects 6 of 10 Filipino families, initial PSA data show

By BusinessMirror, Nov 19, 2018

Initial data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) showed 6 of 10 Filipino families suffer deprivation of basic education services.

THE dream for a better life, a comfortable life, has always included the education of Filipino children. Based on the AmBisyon 2040, the Philippines’s long-term vision, 73 percent of families want their children to be college-educated by 2040.

However, this aspiration may be difficult to attain given the latest data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), which showed Filipino families were most deprived in education.

PSA data showed that, of the 13 indicators, educational attainment had the highest incidence of deprivation among families at 59.3 percent in 2016 and 49.4 percent in 2017.

This meant 6 out of 10 families in 2016 and 5 out of 10 families in 2017 were deprived of basic education. This also means that 6 out of 10 families in 2016 and 5 out of 10 families in 2017 had at least one family member aged 18 years old and above who did not complete basic education.

“It means whatever interventions government is doing, we still don’t feel the impact,” National Statistician and Civil Registrar General Lisa Grace S. Bersales told the BusinessMirror in an interview. “The impact still needs to be felt, so it’s possible that there’s some lag to the high impact effect of the government’s intervention.”

AmBisyon, targets

In order to meet the AmBisyon by 2040, the national government has laid out education targets, which not only focused on tertiary education but also primary and secondary schooling.

Based on the AmBisyon, Filipinos want to take up courses related to various fields, such as education science and teacher training, 16.5 percent; business administration, 12.7 percent; information technology-related, 11.6 percent; and tourism and hospitality.

The list also includes industries, such as engineering and technology, 10 percent; law and jurisprudence, 10 percent; medical and allied industries, 6.9 percent; trade, craft and industrial, 6.7 percent; and maritime, 4.8 percent.

In order to be on track to meeting these, the government, through the Philippine Development Plan 2017 to 2022, has identified a number of basic education targets and strategies.

The government aims to increase functional literacy for kindergarten to 95 percent, from 74.65 percent, the baseline using 2015 data; elementary, 95 percent from the 91.05-percent baseline; and junior high school, 75.44 percent from the 68.15 percent baseline.

Functional literacy, according to the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization, was more than just being able to read and write. Functional literacy means literacy and numeracy skills combined. These are part of lifelong learning aims—included among the Sustainable Development Goals.

“While functional literacy and numeracy will mean different things in different countries and to different organizations, our own view is that they both involve a continuum of skills development that builds over time,” according to a Unesco blog written by Luis Crouch, chief technical officer of the International Development Group and Silvia Montoya, director of the Unesco Institute for Statistics.

This also means mastery of basic skills. To this end, the government aims to increase the proportion of elementary students to 74.39 percent from 63.93 percent, and junior high school, 20 percent from 14.37 percent of performing at moving toward or approximately mastered skills. The government also aims to bring down the proportion of students at low mastery to 10 percent from 14.88 percent for junior high school.

Completion rate

Apart from functional literacy, the government also aims to increase the completion rate for basic education. For elementary education, the government aims to increase this to 90 percent from 83.43 percent, and for junior high school, 78.48 percent.

“Lifelong learning will be pursued to attain both personal and national goals. Filipinos will be equipped with 21st-century skills to engage in meaningful and rewarding careers in today’s changing world of work,” the PDP stated.

Interventions

In order to attain these basic education goals, the government aims to strengthen programs for early childhood care and development in order to adequately prepare for basic education and push for the full implementation of the K to 12.

The list of interventions also includes strengthening inclusion programs, such as ensuring that learners with special needs, indigenous peoples, and out-of-school children and youth are provided with the appropriate educational interventions.

The government also aims to develop and improve interventions to keep children in school, such as feeding programs, counseling programs, remedial classes and conducive learning environments.

The administration also aims to continue curricular reforms, which will focus on culture and the arts, drug-abuse prevention, reproductive health, gender, environment, disaster-risk reduction and management, and climate change.

In order to enhance teacher competencies, the government aims to undertake a responsive preservice education curriculum, mentoring, school learning action cells, workshops, organized training, eLearning and learning visits.

Bersales said government interventions also include the Pantawid ng Pamilyang Pilipino Program which aims to provide Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) to families who keep their children in school.

The CCTs help efforts to implement the K to 12 basic education system, which adds two more years in the years of basic schooling of children. The CCTs started with 284,000 beneficiary households in 2008. By 2015 beneficiaries reached 4.1 million households.

In terms of population, the number of beneficiaries rose from 662,000 children aged zero to 18 years old in 2008 to 10.2 million in 2015. Today, the program covers about 79 percent of poor households whose income is less than the amount needed to basic necessities.

The CCT extends a health grant of P500 monthly year-round and an education grant of P300 per child for 10 months each year to each participating household.

To receive these cash grants, pregnant women must avail themselves of pre- and postnatal care, and be attended during childbirth by a trained professional; and parents or guardians must attend the family-development sessions, which include topics on responsible parenting, health and nutrition.

Other conditions: children aged 0 to 5 must receive regular preventive health check-ups and vaccines; those aged 6 to 14 must receive deworming pills twice a year; and children aged between three and 18 must enroll in school, and maintain an attendance of at least 85 percent of class days every month.

Multidimensional poverty

The data was based on the initial methodology developed for the Multidimensional Poverty Index. While the MPI has not yet been approved by the PSA Board, chaired by Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Ernesto M. Pernia, the PSA was allowed to release the information to elicit comments.

PSA said the MPI “is a measure that intends to capture deprivations on various dimensions. Thus, the MPI provides information on which dimension the Filipinos are most deprived in.” This is different from the methodology currently being used to estimate poverty, which only looks at income.

The current methodology for the MPI has 13 indicators. For education, these are school attendance and educational attainment; while for health and nutrition dimension, the indicators are hunger, food consumption and health insurance.

For the housing, water and sanitation dimension, the indicators are ownership of assets, toilet facility, source of water supply, tenure status of dwelling, housing materials and electricity. In terms of employment dimension, the indicators are underemployment and working children not in school.

Bersales said the MPI, being a new methodology, still needs to be improved and does not constitute official data. These improvements can come from stakeholders, such as the Department of Education (DepEd), who can provide better data or understanding when it comes to basic education deprivation.

“The statistics that we released were meant to catalyze discussion and to ask the questions you’re asking. With your questions, we will also see what we can provide from the data but also this will, we can ask our education, DepEd would be one of the possibilities,” Bersales explained.

“In fact, DepEd could actually question what we have, this is the reason why we’re releasing it. This is not yet official statistics, but we just got the approval of the PSA Board, who allowed us to release the information to get comments,” she added.

Realizing the dreams of over a hundred million Filipinos is a Herculean task. But Bersales said discussions and consultations can help agencies like the PSA provide information that will make this task manageable and attainable in the not-so-near future.