VICE President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte yesterday said the “collective efforts” of the nation is vital to attain quality education for the country’s basic learners amid the challenges facing the country’s education system.
“As the old adage puts it, ‘It takes a village to educate a child.’ In order to ensure quality, accessible, relevant, and liberating basic education for our learners, we need to sustain our collective efforts as a nation. We still have a long way to go. We need to be resilient. We need to do more,” Duterte said in her opening statement during the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2) meeting at the Senate.
EDCOM 2 was created by virtue of RA 11899 that was passed into law in July last year. Its mandate is to conduct a comprehensive national assessment and evaluation of the performance of the country’s education so it can recommend targeted reforms in the sector aimed at making the Philippines globally competitive in both education and labor markets.
Duterte also acknowledged the efforts of the EDCOM 2 commissioners led by Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, as EDCOM 2 co-chairperson, for laying out plans and programs to address the learning crisis in the country “and further improve the country’s education system.”
“We welcome suggestions coming from the commissioners and the Advisory Council. If there are ways by which we can collaborate and support one another, we would be glad to hear them, for we believe that the gargantuan task of addressing woes of the education sector will not happen overnight, nor can be achieved by DepEd alone,” she said.
Gatchalian underscored the importance of employing a whole-of-government approach to be able to address the challenges in the education sector.
He said EDCOM 2 and DepEd can take advantage of their respective expertise to come up with “concrete, targeted, and transformative” policies for the sector.
“Together, we can fulfill our vision of providing quality education for every Filipino learner,” he added.