1. The Vulnerability of EFA in the Philippines

The results of EFA implementation so far have shown that the country has done so much to internalise EFA’s philosophy and goals. An environment conducive to the pursuit of programmes and projects necessary to attain the targets had been laid down in a very decisive fashion. Substantial accomplishments have been realised in expanding access and participation in education and in raising literacy levels. Despite these gains, the EFA decade had also seen an ominous stagnancy in the cohort-survival and repetition rates, increasing dropouts and a slow-moving ascent in school achievement levels. The trends in these indicators, if not either reversed or improved, as the case may be, could in the medium-term cause a setback in the drive towards education for all. Interestingly enough, these symptoms of systemic trouble are poverty-related, which require solutions external to the educational system. Only so much can be done to alleviate these problems by improving, for example, the learning environment and providing the inputs crucial to bringing students to school. In the context of a developing economy, the effectiveness of the school system’s attraction and holding power is often overpowered by the weak staying power of students. Unfortunately, the prevailing modality in educational planning looks at the supply side more than it does the demand side of the educational equation. The poverty concern must thus be addressed, and to do this would require a concerted effort among all government agencies, but especially those that have to do with livelihood, job-generation, health, capability building and other functions that could contribute to the social and economic well being of the citizenry. An outward rather than an insular orientation must thus be adopted by the DECS to effectively cope with the unfortunate situation at hand.

What this assessment has revealed is that the Philippine EFA programme had been most vulnerable when it comes to interventions requiring inter-sectoral and inter-agency co-operation. This had been amply demonstrated by the educational system’s performance vis-à-vis the above-mentioned indicators. The DECS had been so focused on its mainstream internal programmes that it had sidelined the EFA-dedicated entities envisioned to provide the wider perspective so necessary in pursuing the goals of EFA. True enough, there had been other, more established and long-standing avenues for pursuing EFA programmes, but the agenda of these alternative venues are ordinarily filled with so many other concerns. For the third stage of EFA, which anyway is foreordained by virtue of DECS’ own Master Plan for Basic Education, the DECS must begin to look beyond the realms of the educational system, strengthen its bonds with its present and potential partners and employ more non-traditional means of ensuring that children stay in school. It has to realise now that the planning of education and the implementation of its programmes must take into primary and serious consideration the system’s provisions for also for guaranteeing that it has the students to work on. Otherwise, the visions of EFA would slowly, but surely, fall by the wayside.

2. Mapping Out the Next EFA Decade

It was clear from the beginning that the desired learning outcomes of EFA were not to be confined to the conventional education indicators. More importantly, they were to be reckoned in terms of effects in human development and quality of life. For this reason, the basic education policies planned and the social development projects within the PPA were in pursuit of comprehensive human development. The PPA was thus adopted by the Philippines as a priority social development policy and strategy and not merely as an educational program.

One of the revolutionary innovations proposed under EFA was the establishment of viable alternative learning systems encompassing non-formal and informal education. This has been partially fulfilled through the incorporation of the accreditation and equivalency component of ALS in the on-going ADB NFE Project. This is a significant step in validating the feasibility and viability of non-school based learning channels. If the government is serious about this institutionalising this innovation, there is still a need to issue concrete policy instruments on the reconfiguring of national learning systems. This might even necessitate the creation of the Centre for ALS, which is currently being considered in a pending bill creating the Department of Basic Education (DBE). However, a clear philosophical rationale will have to be fully articulated first to all concerned stakeholders.

The strengthening of the partnership between school, home and community and local government is another fertile area for further development. Towards this direction, the DECS has expanded the erstwhile parent-teachers associations (PTAs) into parent-teacher-community associations (PTCAs) by the addition of the community, as part of the self-management of schools under the TEEP package of reforms. LGUs with dynamic school boards have been helping build schools and providing counterpart funding in TEEP implementation. One encouraging sign now is the imminent amendment of the Local Government Code, which will reconstitute the extant local school boards into local basic education boards. The plan calls for the introduction of new functions that will subsume non-school based learning activities and programs. The DECS must then incorporate the active support of this bill’s passage into law in its legislative affairs agenda.

Many changes have already been instituted involving learning content, teacher training, school management, methods, and research application incorporated in the Third Elementary Education Project (TEEP). Policy changes have likewise been introduced towards the development and production of textbooks and the improvement of curriculum grid in non-formal education. However, it seems that the quality goal of EFA in emphasising creative and critical thinking is still to be realised. The DECS must now address this more decisively, but it will require the formulation and implementation of a comprehensive teacher development program covering both pre-service and in-service programs. To accomplish this would require close coordination with the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), which should necessarily be the lead agency in such an undertaking.

The upgrading of teacher competencies and improving their welfare was seen in EFA as a fundamental and long-term policy measure to bring about quality basic education. For this purpose, the National Educators Academy of the Philippines (NEAP) was established while better in-service and pre-service training were included in TEEP and the AusAid-assisted Program in Basic Education (PROBE). Nevertheless, these have only a limited coverage when compared with the enormity of the training and re-training needs. Further advances in the qualitative aspect of this policy will have to be subsumed under the proposed comprehensive teacher development programme. Increasing the in-take of the NEAP will somehow make some difference in the basic education quality goal.

EFA also reiterated the need for priority in the allocation of resources to be given to basic education and called for the equitable allocation of these resources between the formal and non-formal areas and among regions. At this stage, it is worth noting that basic education still gets the lion’s share of the total budget for education but rate of growth is not as fast as resources given to rapidly expanding publicly funded tertiary education. To make this goal more meaningful, new policy instruments covering guidelines for allocating resources across the three levels of education and training including non-formal learning channels must be formulated.

Recommendations

Strengthening the Foundation of Education

0. Priorities

1. The strengthening of the day care programme should be among the first priorities, along with proper maternal and child health, care and nutrition. This is because no matter how much is done to expand the pre-school infrastructure through public and private means, no significant strides can be made without giving equal attention to the factors that would help parents and their children to fully participate. Considering the multi-agency and multi-sectoral nature of and responsibility over these services, the coordinative structures established for the EFA Programme must be given renewed impetus and actively utilised to advance ECCD services in the country.
2. A cohesive and well-coordinated policy and management framework for the advancement of ECCD services must be put in place considering the importance of this programme to future schooling performance among young children. This is a concern that is well founded, since the incidence of repetition in the elementary level is highest in Grade 1.

1. Alternative Modes of Service Delivery

1. Expansion of pre-school services through contracting private sector providers beyond the 5^th and 6^th class municipalities should be seriously considered in order to increase participation.
2. The impact of the 8-week Early Childhood Experiences in Grade 1 scheme should be studied with the view of improving effectiveness or identifying possible alternative modes of delivering ECCD programmes.

1. Priorities

1. The DECS should now veer away from according high priority to the expansion of access and participation, except to accommodate hard-to-reach children and marginalised communities. Instead, it should provide very substantial support to programmes and strategies that address the nagging issues of internal efficiency and external effectiveness.

1. Programme Interventions

1. Minimise the practice of investing funds into numerous pilot and experimental projects unless their concepts, designs and most importantly, their sustainability are well evaluated and validated. DECS needs to plan investments by scaling up and institutionalising pilot projects. This may include successful projects such as the DIP, TCP, Multigrade Programme and Project BRIGHT, among others.

Teacher Development

2. A comprehensive teacher education and development programme covering both pre-service and in-service components should be formulated and implemented to improve teaching-learning in the classrooms. New teaching approaches, which promote active, participatory and experiential learning should be introduced. There should be a shift in the teacher’s role as provider of knowledge to a facilitator of the learning process/environment.
3. Upgrade teaching approaches and techniques through the conduct of school-based inset by principals and supervisors.

Pre-service curriculum revisions in the Bachelor’s degree programme should be made by the teacher training institutions to upgrade and update the teaching competencies of prospective graduates. The updating process should involve a broad-based consultation among stakeholders including parents and civil society organisations.

Curriculum and Content

4. A broad-based curriculum review involving stakeholders outside of education should be conducted.

Appropriate observance and compliance with the instructional requirements of the Minimum Learning Competencies (MLC) should be ensured through adequate coverage in the teacher pre-service programme, availability of teaching materials and closer matching of learning objectives with approved textbooks.

1. Standards

1. Formulation of performance standards and close monitoring of school performance against such standards should be conducted by the regional and divisions offices.

1. Testing

1. Enhance the use of NEAT results for analysing sub-sector performance and improving individual school performance
2. Development and use of more varied instruments to measure multilevel intelligence including life skills in classroom teaching.
3. A comprehensive testing programme vis-à-vis the curriculum should be evolved by the guidance counsellor in coordination with the subject teachers.

1. Compensatory and Differential Approaches to Schooling

1. A schooling process that incorporates strategies to compensate for initial deficits among children should be developed and implemented nationwide. The fact that repetition in Grade 1 is highest among the six grades of primary education reflects the inadequacy of preparation among the young children. All told, the pupils the formal education system has to work with are generally handicapped by serious deficiencies in personal constitution and in the skills needed for successful schooling.
2. Differentiated approaches should be allowed for males and females and for urban and rural areas when formulating interventions to combat the low survival rate and high dropout and repetition rates. The findings in the assessment regarding consistently unequal performance among these categories support this recommendation.
3. Children in difficult circumstances such as child labourers/workers, children with disabilities and offsprings of migrant workers should be included as categories of special children that require focused and differentiated approaches such as distance learning. These children need alternative learning approaches because of the serious structural difficulty in maintaining school attendance.

1. Programme Interventions

1. Strengthen multigrade teaching as the norm for difficult-to-reach areas and sparsely populated areas.

Undertake an in-depth study to determine why there had been no significant reduction in the repetition and dropout rates in spite of all the educational reform efforts.

1. Curriculum and Content

1. A re-visit of the medium of instruction, focusing on the early years of schooling, should be made.

1. Testing

1. As a matter of procedure, student evaluation should involve the classroom teacher, the guidance counsellor and the school head.

1. An updated EFA plan, which would reflect new EFA targets for the next decade should be formulated through multi-sectoral participation. Consequently, there is a need to update the Master Plan for Basic Education (MPBE) to serve as a major input to the new EFA plan.
2. DECS should adopt an equity-based resource allocation policy that targets the disadvantaged provinces and areas rather than continue with its student population-based and more often across-the-board method of allocating school inputs.
3. DECS should also adopt a budget prioritisation policy that programs the allocation of funds such that high-need programmes are provided huge blocks of financing for a certain period to the sacrifice of other necessary, but lower-priority ones must be put into effect.
4. In planning and budgeting for education, the DECS should now begin to look more closely into the demand side rather than simply on the supply side of the educational equation. In the past, the orientation had always been on enhancing the attraction and then the holding power of schools, but not much has been done about improving the staying power of pupils.
5. The model and procedures utilised under the Philippine EFA 2000 Assessment should be institutionalised and made to form part of regular DECS monitoring and evaluation activities.

1. Outreach programmes that literally bring the training to marginalized and difficult to reach groups should be promoted rather than just concentrating on static training venues. As literacy programmes intensify and literacy rates rise higher, there will come the time when illiteracy will be confined to a hardcore segment that either refuses to attend or is difficult to reach.
2. The Non-Formal Education Accreditation and Equivalency (A & E) programme offers an alternative pathway by which out-of-school youth and adults can earn educational qualifications comparable to the formal school system. It utilises a range of innovative non-formal learning strategies designed to break down the traditional learning barriers of time, accessibility and resources. The A & E, which is currently in pilot stage, should be given support as an alternative means of certification of learning for persons aged 15 years and older who are unable to avail of the formal school system or who have dropped out.
3. Concrete steps should be taken to further enhance access and participation in literacy programmes by integrating livelihood skills training components and finding solutions to non-participation caused by fear of stigmatisation.
4. Community learning centres should be established where literacy materials are provided for completers to enrich their new skills. Lack of practice in using reading and writing skills make literacy graduates revert to their former state.

1. The Grand Alliance

1. Revive the concept of the grand alliance through the National Committee for EFA (NCEFA) and existing structures ensuring multi-sectoral participation to support EFA goals.
2. There should be more concerted efforts to incorporate EFA goals and targets in the agenda of educators and legislators both at the central and field levels.

Institute policies and practices in the DECS to promote greater inter-sectoral coordination in education to widen the participation of civil society and other non-DECS education stakeholders in the formulation of educational policies and programmes; the review and enrichment of the curriculum; monitoring and evaluation of the sector’s performance and the formulation of educational reform measures.

1. Enhancing ECCD Services

1. DECS must adopt a policy of encouraging greater private sector participation to alleviate its inability to provide universal pre-schooling due to lack of finances. A hospitable environment must be created by the DECS to encourage this, through, inter alia, the facilitation of permit approval. DECS can then provide more attention to the rural areas where the participation rate is only half that of the urban areas, and where publicly subsidised pre-schools and other forms of ECCD services can generate more interest among the parents.
2. Government should ensure the approval of the ECCD bill that seeks to institutionalise a programme of early childhood care and development that covers the full range of health, nutrition, psycho-social and early education services for children aged 0 to 6. This will involve a grand alliance among the national and local government units, NGOs and civil society. The bill will also strengthen the Council on the Welfare of Children (CWC) and make it the national coordinator of ECCD programmes.
3. DECS must also ensure that all its field units especially at the division level equally promote and support ECCD through its pre-school programme.
4. Social marketing should be conducted among LGUs to expand ECCD programmes and the organization of ECCD coordinating councils at the regional, provincial, municipal/city and barangay levels.
5. Strengthen networking for better information dissemination and data sharing between and among government, NGOs and other sectors involved in providing ECCD services.
6. Improvement of ECCD data collection, reporting and monitoring should be accorded priority. This assessment was hampered by the unavailability of current ECCD especially as they concern the health, social welfare and nutrition sub-sectors. Closer coordination must be established with LGUs,

1. – Future Directions for the Philippine EFA
1. The Vulnerability of EFA in the Philippines

The results of EFA implementation so far have shown that the country has done so much to internalise EFA’s philosophy and goals. An environment conducive to the pursuit of programmes and projects necessary to attain the targets had been laid down in a very decisive fashion. Substantial accomplishments have been realised in expanding access and participation in education and in raising literacy levels. Despite these gains, the EFA decade had also seen an ominous stagnancy in the cohort-survival and repetition rates, increasing dropouts and a slow-moving ascent in school achievement levels. The trends in these indicators, if not either reversed or improved, as the case may be, could in the medium-term cause a setback in the drive towards education for all. Interestingly enough, these symptoms of systemic trouble are poverty-related, which require solutions external to the educational system. Only so much can be done to alleviate these problems by improving, for example, the learning environment and providing the inputs crucial to bringing students to school. In the context of a developing economy, the effectiveness of the school system’s attraction and holding power is often overpowered by the weak staying power of students. Unfortunately, the prevailing modality in educational planning looks at the supply side more than it does the demand side of the educational equation. The poverty concern must thus be addressed, and to do this would require a concerted effort among all government agencies, but especially those that have to do with livelihood, job-generation, health, capability building and other functions that could contribute to the social and economic well being of the citizenry. An outward rather than an insular orientation must thus be adopted by the DECS to effectively cope with the unfortunate situation at hand.

What this assessment has revealed is that the Philippine EFA programme had been most vulnerable when it comes to interventions requiring inter-sectoral and inter-agency co-operation. This had been amply demonstrated by the educational system’s performance vis-à-vis the above-mentioned indicators. The DECS had been so focused on its mainstream internal programmes that it had sidelined the EFA-dedicated entities envisioned to provide the wider perspective so necessary in pursuing the goals of EFA. True enough, there had been other, more established and long-standing avenues for pursuing EFA programmes, but the agenda of these alternative venues are ordinarily filled with so many other concerns. For the third stage of EFA, which anyway is foreordained by virtue of DECS’ own Master Plan for Basic Education, the DECS must begin to look beyond the realms of the educational system, strengthen its bonds with its present and potential partners and employ more non-traditional means of ensuring that children stay in school. It has to realise now that the planning of education and the implementation of its programmes must take into primary and serious consideration the system’s provisions for also for guaranteeing that it has the students to work on. Otherwise, the visions of EFA would slowly, but surely, fall by the wayside.

2. Mapping Out the Next EFA Decade

It was clear from the beginning that the desired learning outcomes of EFA were not to be confined to the conventional education indicators. More importantly, they were to be reckoned in terms of effects in human development and quality of life. For this reason, the basic education policies planned and the social development projects within the PPA were in pursuit of comprehensive human development. The PPA was thus adopted by the Philippines as a priority social development policy and strategy and not merely as an educational program.

One of the revolutionary innovations proposed under EFA was the establishment of viable alternative learning systems encompassing non-formal and informal education. This has been partially fulfilled through the incorporation of the accreditation and equivalency component of ALS in the on-going ADB NFE Project. This is a significant step in validating the feasibility and viability of non-school based learning channels. If the government is serious about this institutionalising this innovation, there is still a need to issue concrete policy instruments on the reconfiguring of national learning systems. This might even necessitate the creation of the Centre for ALS, which is currently being considered in a pending bill creating the Department of Basic Education (DBE). However, a clear philosophical rationale will have to be fully articulated first to all concerned stakeholders.

The strengthening of the partnership between school, home and community and local government is another fertile area for further development. Towards this direction, the DECS has expanded the erstwhile parent-teachers associations (PTAs) into parent-teacher-community associations (PTCAs) by the addition of the community, as part of the self-management of schools under the TEEP package of reforms. LGUs with dynamic school boards have been helping build schools and providing counterpart funding in TEEP implementation. One encouraging sign now is the imminent amendment of the Local Government Code, which will reconstitute the extant local school boards into local basic education boards. The plan calls for the introduction of new functions that will subsume non-school based learning activities and programs. The DECS must then incorporate the active support of this bill’s passage into law in its legislative affairs agenda.

Many changes have already been instituted involving learning content, teacher training, school management, methods, and research application incorporated in the Third Elementary Education Project (TEEP). Policy changes have likewise been introduced towards the development and production of textbooks and the improvement of curriculum grid in non-formal education. However, it seems that the quality goal of EFA in emphasising creative and critical thinking is still to be realised. The DECS must now address this more decisively, but it will require the formulation and implementation of a comprehensive teacher development program covering both pre-service and in-service programs. To accomplish this would require close coordination with the Commission on Higher Education (CHED), which should necessarily be the lead agency in such an undertaking.

The upgrading of teacher competencies and improving their welfare was seen in EFA as a fundamental and long-term policy measure to bring about quality basic education. For this purpose, the National Educators Academy of the Philippines (NEAP) was established while better in-service and pre-service training were included in TEEP and the AusAid-assisted Program in Basic Education (PROBE). Nevertheless, these have only a limited coverage when compared with the enormity of the training and re-training needs. Further advances in the qualitative aspect of this policy will have to be subsumed under the proposed comprehensive teacher development programme. Increasing the in-take of the NEAP will somehow make some difference in the basic education quality goal.

EFA also reiterated the need for priority in the allocation of resources to be given to basic education and called for the equitable allocation of these resources between the formal and non-formal areas and among regions. At this stage, it is worth noting that basic education still gets the lion’s share of the total budget for education but rate of growth is not as fast as resources given to rapidly expanding publicly funded tertiary education. To make this goal more meaningful, new policy instruments covering guidelines for allocating resources across the three levels of education and training including non-formal learning channels must be formulated.

3. Recommendations

Strengthening the Foundation of Education

1. Priorities

1. The strengthening of the day care programme should be among the first priorities, along with proper maternal and child health, care and nutrition. This is because no matter how much is done to expand the pre-school infrastructure through public and private means, no significant strides can be made without giving equal attention to the factors that would help parents and their children to fully participate. Considering the multi-agency and multi-sectoral nature of and responsibility over these services, the coordinative structures established for the EFA Programme must be given renewed impetus and actively utilised to advance ECCD services in the country.
2. A cohesive and well-coordinated policy and management framework for the advancement of ECCD services must be put in place considering the importance of this programme to future schooling performance among young children. This is a concern that is well founded, since the incidence of repetition in the elementary level is highest in Grade 1.

1. Alternative Modes of Service Delivery

1. Expansion of pre-school services through contracting private sector providers beyond the 5^th and 6^th class municipalities should be seriously considered in order to increase participation.
2. The impact of the 8-week Early Childhood Experiences in Grade 1 scheme should be studied with the view of improving effectiveness or identifying possible alternative modes of delivering ECCD programmes.

1. Priorities

1. The DECS should now veer away from according high priority to the expansion of access and participation, except to accommodate hard-to-reach children and marginalised communities. Instead, it should provide very substantial support to programmes and strategies that address the nagging issues of internal efficiency and external effectiveness.

1. Programme Interventions

1. Minimise the practice of investing funds into numerous pilot and experimental projects unless their concepts, designs and most importantly, their sustainability are well evaluated and validated. DECS needs to plan investments by scaling up and institutionalising pilot projects. This may include successful projects such as the DIP, TCP, Multigrade Programme and Project BRIGHT, among others.

Teacher Development

2. A comprehensive teacher education and development programme covering both pre-service and in-service components should be formulated and implemented to improve teaching-learning in the classrooms. New teaching approaches, which promote active, participatory and experiential learning should be introduced. There should be a shift in the teacher’s role as provider of knowledge to a facilitator of the learning process/environment.
3. Upgrade teaching approaches and techniques through the conduct of school-based inset by principals and supervisors.

Pre-service curriculum revisions in the Bachelor’s degree programme should be made by the teacher training institutions to upgrade and update the teaching competencies of prospective graduates. The updating process should involve a broad-based consultation among stakeholders including parents and civil society organisations.

Curriculum and Content

4. A broad-based curriculum review involving stakeholders outside of education should be conducted.

Appropriate observance and compliance with the instructional requirements of the Minimum Learning Competencies (MLC) should be ensured through adequate coverage in the teacher pre-service programme, availability of teaching materials and closer matching of learning objectives with approved textbooks.

1. Standards

1. Formulation of performance standards and close monitoring of school performance against such standards should be conducted by the regional and divisions offices.

1. Testing

1. Enhance the use of NEAT results for analysing sub-sector performance and improving individual school performance
2. Development and use of more varied instruments to measure multilevel intelligence including life skills in classroom teaching.
3. A comprehensive testing programme vis-à-vis the curriculum should be evolved by the guidance counsellor in coordination with the subject teachers.

1. ompensatory and Differential Approaches to Schooling

1. A schooling process that incorporates strategies to compensate for initial deficits among children should be developed and implemented nationwide. The fact that repetition in Grade 1 is highest among the six grades of primary education reflects the inadequacy of preparation among the young children. All told, the pupils the formal education system has to work with are generally handicapped by serious deficiencies in personal constitution and in the skills needed for successful schooling.
2. Differentiated approaches should be allowed for males and females and for urban and rural areas when formulating interventions to combat the low survival rate and high dropout and repetition rates. The findings in the assessment regarding consistently unequal performance among these categories support this recommendation.
3. Children in difficult circumstances such as child labourers/workers, children with disabilities and offsprings of migrant workers should be included as categories of special children that require focused and differentiated approaches such as distance learning. These children need alternative learning approaches because of the serious structural difficulty in maintaining school attendance.

1. Programme Interventions

1. Strengthen multigrade teaching as the norm for difficult-to-reach areas and sparsely populated areas.

Undertake an in-depth study to determine why there had been no significant reduction in the repetition and dropout rates in spite of all the educational reform efforts.

1. Curriculum and Content

1. A re-visit of the medium of instruction, focusing on the early years of schooling, should be made.

1. Testing

1. As a matter of procedure, student evaluation should involve the classroom teacher, the guidance counsellor and the school head.

1. An updated EFA plan, which would reflect new EFA targets for the next decade should be formulated through multi-sectoral participation. Consequently, there is a need to update the Master Plan for Basic Education (MPBE) to serve as a major input to the new EFA plan.
2. DECS should adopt an equity-based resource allocation policy that targets the disadvantaged provinces and areas rather than continue with its student population-based and more often across-the-board method of allocating school inputs.
3. DECS should also adopt a budget prioritisation policy that programs the allocation of funds such that high-need programmes are provided huge blocks of financing for a certain period to the sacrifice of other necessary, but lower-priority ones must be put into effect.
4. In planning and budgeting for education, the DECS should now begin to look more closely into the demand side rather than simply on the supply side of the educational equation. In the past, the orientation had always been on enhancing the attraction and then the holding power of schools, but not much has been done about improving the staying power of pupils.
5. The model and procedures utilised under the Philippine EFA 2000 Assessment should be institutionalised and made to form part of regular DECS monitoring and evaluation activities.

1. Outreach programmes that literally bring the training to marginalized and difficult to reach groups should be promoted rather than just concentrating on static training venues. As literacy programmes intensify and literacy rates rise higher, there will come the time when illiteracy will be confined to a hardcore segment that either refuses to attend or is difficult to reach.
2. The Non-Formal Education Accreditation and Equivalency (A & E) programme offers an alternative pathway by which out-of-school youth and adults can earn educational qualifications comparable to the formal school system. It utilises a range of innovative non-formal learning strategies designed to break down the traditional learning barriers of time, accessibility and resources. The A & E, which is currently in pilot stage, should be given support as an alternative means of certification of learning for persons aged 15 years and older who are unable to avail of the formal school system or who have dropped out.
3. Concrete steps should be taken to further enhance access and participation in literacy programmes by integrating livelihood skills training components and finding solutions to non-participation caused by fear of stigmatisation.
4. Community learning centres should be established where literacy materials are provided for completers to enrich their new skills. Lack of practice in using reading and writing skills make literacy graduates revert to their former state.

1. The Grand Alliance

1. Revive the concept of the grand alliance through the National Committee for EFA (NCEFA) and existing structures ensuring multi-sectoral participation to support EFA goals.
2. There should be more concerted efforts to incorporate EFA goals and targets in the agenda of educators and legislators both at the central and field levels.

Institute policies and practices in the DECS to promote greater inter-sectoral coordination in education to widen the participation of civil society and other non-DECS education stakeholders in the formulation of educational policies and programmes; the review and enrichment of the curriculum; monitoring and evaluation of the sector’s performance and the formulation of educational reform measures.

1. Enhancing ECCD Services

1. DECS must adopt a policy of encouraging greater private sector participation to alleviate its inability to provide universal pre-schooling due to lack of finances. A hospitable environment must be created by the DECS to encourage this, through, inter alia, the facilitation of permit approval. DECS can then provide more attention to the rural areas where the participation rate is only half that of the urban areas, and where publicly subsidised pre-schools and other forms of ECCD services can generate more interest among the parents.
2. Government should ensure the approval of the ECCD bill that seeks to institutionalise a programme of early childhood care and development that covers the full range of health, nutrition, psycho-social and early education services for children aged 0 to 6. This will involve a grand alliance among the national and local government units, NGOs and civil society. The bill will also strengthen the Council on the Welfare of Children (CWC) and make it the national coordinator of ECCD programmes.
3. DECS must also ensure that all its field units especially at the division level equally promote and support ECCD through its pre-school programme.
4. Social marketing should be conducted among LGUs to expand ECCD programmes and the organization of ECCD coordinating councils at the regional, provincial, municipal/city and barangay levels.
5. Strengthen networking for better information dissemination and data sharing between and among government, NGOs and other sectors involved in providing ECCD services.
6. Improvement of ECCD data collection, reporting and monitoring should be accorded priority. This assessment was hampered by the unavailability of current ECCD especially as they concern the health, social welfare and nutrition sub-sectors. Closer coordination must be established with LGUs,

                                                                                                                            END