The national government has obtained a new loan from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to help students perform better in the National Achievement Test (NAT) and assessments for vocational and livelihood courses after high school.
In a news statement issued on Monday, the ADB said it has extended a $300-million loan to finance the Secondary Education Support Program, which is expected to contribute to the government’s aim of reducing poverty to 14 percent by 2022 from the current 21 percent.
The program is expected to benefit 10.6 million students nationwide. These students are currently enrolled in high school, and an additional 2 million Grade 7 entrants yearly from 2019 to 2023.
“Sustaining the Philippines’s strong growth momentum will require a work force equipped with the appropriate set of advanced skills and knowledge to allow them to keep in step with the rapid technological changes in the global economy,” said ADB Senior Education Specialist for Southeast Asia Lynnette Perez. “Continued investments in high-quality education are crucial to attaining the government’s vision of lowering unemployment and poverty rates.”
The program will help the government sustain its reforms, particularly in offering the poor greater access to better, affordable education. It will disburse funds to the government based on the achievement of agreed reform targets within a specific period.
ADB is also providing technical assistance to the Department of Education to ensure they achieve targeted reforms and priorities, aligned with the Philippine Development Plan.
The program aims to strengthen the secondary-education curriculum and increase teacher proficiency and career development. Nearly 294,000 public secondary-education teachers, and additional teachers to be hired until 2023, stand to benefit from improved teaching practices, which will lead to better learning outcomes.
The program will also support the Department of Education’s public financial management reforms, including the timely release of secondary schools’ budget for maintenance and operation, tools and equipment. It will also assess the effectiveness of the Education Service Contracting and the Senior High School Voucher programs.
While reforms in the Philippine secondary-education system have shown progress, enrollment and graduation rates remain low, especially among students from the poorest households.
The government is continuing to address the challenges to quality education by, for example, deploying adequate numbers of specialized teachers, providing sufficient teaching resources, and ensuring the alignment of the curriculum to labor-market needs.
The program builds on an ongoing ADB assistance under the Senior High School Support Program, which is supporting the establishment and rollout of the government’s senior high-school program.
The ADB also has supported reforms to recruit qualified science and math teachers, provide more classrooms, implement the new senior high school curriculum, including the technical-vocational-livelihood track, and develop and administer the Senior High School Voucher Program, which is currently benefitting 1.3 million students.