Education department asked to devolve functions

MANILA -The industry-led advocacy group Philippine Business for Education (PBEd) is pushing to devolve some functions of the Department of Education (DepEd) to local governments to make the government agency more efficient.

PBEd president Chito Salazar said this during a meeting among the business group’s board of trustees last week, noting that many of the DepEd’s functions were too centralized.

He said it was “because as we see from school books, text books, classroom building, different means of teaching, even simple things like whether we should lock down or not, holiday or no holiday, these can’t be decided on a national level.”

“We need to somehow devolve more of the powers down to the local government in some way, shape or form,” he added.

Despite this, the PBEd official admitted that this would be a huge undertaking that would require major discussions on how to go about this.

Start the conversations

“But we hope that, from PBed’s perspective, discussions could begin. It doesn’t need to end [soon] because it really is a major overhaul,” he said.
Salazar said there was also a need for the different government agencies to have stronger coordination and institutionalization of their processes.

Late last month, the PBEd called on President Marcos to make the education sector one of his administration’s priorities, highlighting the need to implement a number of policy measures to address a “learning crisis” in the country.

Beyond this administration

Aside from these two policy measures, the business group also proposed the creation of a long-term national education agenda that would go beyond the current administration’s term limit.

The issue on child nutrition was also a focal advocacy of the group. According to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, the Philippines is among the 10 countries with the highest incidence of child stunting, with 28.8 percent of kids under five years old being stunted. INQ