MANILA – The Department of Education (DepEd) formally began on Monday classes in public and private schools around the country for the school year 2021-2022.
Education Secretary Leonor Briones remarked in her welcome speech that this year’s start of classes is the second “in the time of Covid and a celebration of last school year’s success”.
Since the outbreak, the DepEd has designed a learning continuity strategy in which essential learning competencies were reduced from over 15,000 to 5,000 and modules were developed.
Face-to-face classes have been postponed due to the threat of new transmissible coronavirus variants, hence digital learning methods have been developed.
“We ended the School Year 2020-2021 in victory. Our tentative graduation figures indicated that 98.13 percent or 2,055,499 of 2,115,040 Grade 6 learners made it and our Grade 10 learners also did very well. 96.9 percent or 1,881,817 out of 1,940,578 completed their studies,” Briones said.
As of now, a total of 24,603,822 million students have enrolled in private and public schools around the country.
According to the latest data from the DepEd’s Learner Information System Quick Count, around 20,046,495 students have enrolled, with 4,557,327 registered early as of June 2.
Meanwhile, 198,297 students have registered for the Alternative Learning System.
“Today, at school opening, we are encouraged by the enrollment turnout based on our LIS-quick count. The enrollment reports are still on a steady upward trend,” Education Undersecretary Nepomuceno Malaluan said.
Given the reporting lag and various regions exceeding 100 percent of last year’s enrolment, Malaluan stated that there was evidence that not only learners from last year are continuing this year, but also those learners who chose to skip are returning.
