MANILA, Philippines — Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian is seeking a Senate inquiry on strengthening the complementary roles of public and private schools to achieve the country’s national objectives and sustainable development goals in education.
In Proposed Senate Resolution No. 12, Gatchalian said there was a need to formulate a dynamic and responsive framework to further operationalize the principle of complementarity between public and private institutions to establish a more integrated system of education.
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Gatchalian, who chairs the Senate Committee on Basic Education, pointed to the challenges hounding the private education sector, some of which were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic downturn.
The senator said that enrollment for School Year 2021-2022 was 23% below pre-pandemic levels, which resulted in the closure of 185 private schools during this period.
Another challenge of the education sector is the discrepancy in salaries between public and private school teachers, which resulted in the exodus of teachers to public schools. The average monthly public school teacher salary was P20,754 in 2019 and increased to P22,316 in 2020 when the second semester of SY 2019-2020 began.
A survey done by the Coordinating Council of Private Educational Associations of the Philippines, the largest collective of private schools in the country, found that the average monthly private school teacher was P14,132 at the elementary level, P15,048 in junior high school and P16,258 in senior high schools.
“Our private schools are our partners in delivering quality education for our youth. Since they continue to face many challenges that worsened during the pandemic, it is timely for us to study how they can recover," Gatchalian said in Filipino.
Private schools also feel the bite
In-person classes across the country started in September after implementing blended learning setups during the coronavirus-induced community quarantines. But private schools opened up weeks before that, while restrictions paralyzed the operations of smaller schools in the middle of a COVID-19 surge.
By end-August, the Commission Higher Education also lifted the requirement for vaccination for students and faculty of higher education institutions.
At his committee's first organizational meeting, Gatchalian proposed that if 1,179 private schools are closed, those facilities can be used by senior and high schools, pointing out that the backlog for classrooms is worth some P80 billion.
In a study last year, the World Bank found that around 9 in 10 Philippine children were suffering from “learning poverty”, which is defined as 10-year-old children being unable to read and understand a simple story.
In 2020, by official estimates from the Department of Education, some 400,000 students were forced to move from private to public schools.