MANILA, Philippines – Public schools in the Philippines opened a new academic year on Monday, June 8, rolling out the three-term calendar and other policy reforms in basic education.

The Department of Education (DepEd) is projecting 26 million to 28 million enrollees for both public and private schools in school year (SY) 2026-2027.

Public schools are required to follow the shift from a quarterly grading period to a three-term system, while the new calendar is only optional for private schools this year. The change did not undergo a pilot test.

Lessons are not yet expected during the first week or the opening block, as it will be the period for opening activities, such as orientation sessions, learner profiling, baseline assessments, and other administrative processes. 

The DepEd has said that it aims to protect instructional time in classrooms with the change in the school calendar, as it continues to deal with the decades-long learning crisis in the country. 

Even with its learning recovery efforts, particularly the first year of implementation of the Academic Recovery and Accessible Learning (ARAL) Program, end-of-year literacy assessments in SY 2025-2026 still showed that only 48% of learners were “grade level-ready” or “independent” readers.

Independent readers are learners who can read and comprehend material for their grade level with minimal to no teacher assistance.

The DepEd also conducted the pilot Senior High School (SHS) Literacy and Numeracy Assessment last March, which revealed that most Grade 11 students find it difficult to read and understand grade-level texts.

For University of the Philippines Diliman professor Dina Ocampo, education officials should focus on helping individual schools understand their literacy assessment results better.

“The DepEd has the bureaucracy to do it, and then help that school convert it to programs that matter to their context,” Ocampo, a former DepEd undersecretary who helped craft the K to 12 program, told Rappler in a mix of English and Filipino.

Meanwhile, the Alliance of Concerned Teachers raised the lack of clarity regarding the compensation of teachers who will be handling ARAL or remediation sessions. The group said teachers who are “underloaded” this school year were automatically tapped to be ARAL tutors.

The DepEd has nearly P9 billion to implement the ARAL Program in 2026. Around P1.96 billion was allocated for the compensation of external tutors.

More policy changes

Aside from the three-term calendar, the DepEd will implement various policy reforms such as “simplified” lesson planning and a new grading system, where students must now attain a raw score of 70 to 72.99 to get a passing grade of 75. Previously, a raw score of 60 would be transmuted or converted to 75.

Other changes include the refinement of the learning continuity plan for emergencies such as extreme weather, earthquakes, health crises, and armed conflict.

The Strengthened SHS Program will also be fully implemented in public and private schools nationwide this school year, while the Matatag curriculum will have its scheduled execution for Grades 3, 6, and 9.

The policy reforms come months after the release of the Second Congressional Commission on Education’s January 2026 report, which showed plummeting proficiency among students and a host of other issues.

Under the 2026 national budget, the education sector was allocated P1.34 trillion, of which P1.015 trillion went to the DepEd.

Around P65 billion of the DepEd’s budget will be used to build 24,000 new classrooms to narrow the gap. As of 2025, the shortage was at 165,000.

Construction arrangements have been expanded to public-private partnerships and qualified local government units, following the flood control corruption scandal involving the Department of Public Works and Highways. – Rappler.com