More than 25 million elementary and high school students will return to their classrooms today, June 13, as the country welcomes the first batch of Grade 11 pupils under the Senior High School program which adds two more years to the Philippines’ basic education system.
The program, a product of Republic Act 10533 or the Enhanced Basic Education Act which adds mandatory kindergarten for all children of school age and two more years in high school, removed the country from the list of three nations (the others being Angola and Djibouti in Africa) implementing a 10-year pre-university education scheme.
“We celebrate this historic moment in Philippine education and enjoin every citizen to work to ensure the success of these new programs,” Education Secretary Armin Luistro told The Standard in a text interview.
“New programs will necessarily have their birth pains. I am as excited as our more than a million new learners in Grade 11 are,” he added.
An estimated 1.5 million students are set to choose more than 28,844 SHS programs spread over 5,990 public schools and 5,028 private high schools, which the DepEd expects to better prepare students “whichever exit point they plan on pursuing after high school.”
High school education is currently a “one-size-fits-all” program that assumes all graduates are meant for college, the department says. High school graduates who cannot afford college cannot land good jobs.
The four tracks in the SHS program are Academic, Technical-Vocational-Livelihood, Sports, and Arts and Design.
Program offerings available for SHS students to choose from include four strands under the academic track: Accountancy, Business and Management (ABM), Humanities and Social Sciences (HUMSS), Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), and General Academic; the Sports track; the Arts and Design track; and various specializations under the Technical-Vocational-Livelihood (TVL) track.