Castro, Espiritu vow to prioritize education if elected as senators

ACT-Teachers Party-list Rep. France Castro and lawyer Luke Espiritu said they would prioritize the education sector if elected as senators.

During the senatorial forum hosted by the Philippine Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, Castro said her priority bill is to ensure that the education budget becomes the "number one" priority or to make it at least six percent of the country's gross domestic product (GDP).

"So meaning in concrete terms, our budget for education should be doubled so that we can better address the shortage of teachers, infrastructure, and then we need to provide the technologies that our students and teaching staff need," the lawmaker explained in Filipino.

"And you may not know this, but the number one thing in our budget is appropriated for paying our debt," she added.

Meanwhile, Espiritu said that the international standard for education budgeting is six percent of the GDP. However, the Philippines only allocates around three to four percent.

"So we have to comply with the Constitutional mandate to give the highest priority to education so we could develop our curriculum, we could have more facilities, and pay our teachers more," the labor leader said.

"Those are preconditions for high-quality education," Espiritu added.

Currently serving as the president of the Buklurang Manggagawang Pilipino, Espiritu first ran for senator in 2022, placing 34th with 3,470,550 votes.

Meanwhile, Wilson Amad and Jerome Adonis, it would be better to add more public schools as private schools "are mainly for business."

"So I agree that we need to increase the budget for education so we could translate it to building more public schools and universities," Adonis said.

Adonis said public schools are more accessible to the children of farmers and Indigenous Peoples.

Amad, who is running as an independent candidate, previously filed his candidacy for vice president in 2022, but the Commission on Elections (Comelec) declared him a nuisance candidate.

Trade union and labor activist Adonis is the general secretary of Kilusang Mayo Uno, the largest trade union group in the country. He is running under Makabayan.