Education Secretary Sonny Angara said on Monday he recently met with stakeholders and industry partners in a bid to further strengthen the Senior High School program and ensure that graduates are “future-ready.”
In a statement, Angara said the dialogues, held on January 8, 10, and 15, engaged 31 private schools and technical vocational institutions, 14 companies and organizations from various regions, seven government agencies, and representatives from different offices of DepEd Central Office to gather feedback and recommendations for refining the SHS curriculum.
“We have to make our high school graduates employable. And they have to go into quality jobs. Not jobs where they will barely earn a living wage or enable them to feed their family. Enable them to live a quality life,” Angara said.
During the dialogues, Angara said they also discussed the ongoing revision of the senior high school curriculum, including decongesting and simplifying it, it, putting a premium on learner choice, ensuring “stackability and seamlessness” to facilitate progression, and strengthening the industry linkages.
The DepEd Chief added that the consultations would be an ongoing collaboration to further improve education policies and the senior high school curriculum.
“Just as I promised during the dialogue, our conversations with TESDA, with industry, with private institutions will be a continuing process. I think it will never stop because in the implementation, industries will continue to evolve, to change. So we need to evolve along with them,” he added.
In addition to these efforts, the DepEd Curriculum and Teaching strand also held discussions with Curriculum and Human Resource officials and field personnel from 16 Regional and 128 Schools Division Offices on the proposed Senior High School curriculum.
Local consultations led by Regional CLMD Chiefs on the matter will also be held from January 24 to February 24.
Earlier, Angara said senior high school students will have to undergo more hours of on-the-job training and apprenticeship as part of efforts to further hone their skills and increase their chances of being employed.
He said this was the request made by the DepEd’s industry partners.
President Marcos had earlier directed Angara to prioritize improving the employability of senior high school graduates.
A report released by the Philippine Business for Education in July showed there are now more companies open to hiring senior high school graduates but many still prefer college graduates, adding that the job-skills mismatch persists.
The report, titled “PBEd’s 2024 Jobs Outlook Study” covering 299 participant companies, showed that almost half or 46 percent of them currently hire K to 12 graduates, while large companies – 63 percent – are more likely to hire compared with micro, small and medium enterprises.
The report said this is an improvement over a similar study in 2018 which found that only three out of five companies were willing to hire senior high school graduates.
The 2018 study also showed that only one out of five firms were ready with hiring policies for senior high school graduates.
However, the 2024 study showed that only 27 percent of entry-level jobs were projected to be filled up by senior high school graduates as companies still prefer to hire applicants with college degrees.
PBEd said the labor market, government, industry and academic institutions need to work closely together to address the gap.