Incoming Education Secretary Sonny Angara said President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. issued an instruction to prepare senior high school students for employment.

“The President did not say the main point of K-12 is to make Pinoys employable abroad — but he did instruct me to make sure our senior high school graduates have the credentials and skills to get jobs as the government promised a decade ago when we added two years to the basic education curriculum,” Angara said on his X (formerly Twitter) page.

Marcos earlier said the K-to-12 curriculum failed to make good in terms of the employment of high school students.

“If you remember, we pushed for K-12 because the required years of training for jobs employment is 12 years; the Philippines was only giving 10 years. So that was the reason we did it to make the graduates employable,” Marcos said in an ambush interview in Sulu over the weekend.

“But if we look at the results, it did not increase, their employability did not improve. So we have to do something else,” he added.