The House Committee on Basic Education and Culture renewed its call to the Department of Education (DepEd) on Friday to reduce the number of learning competencies and focus solely on core subjects, reading comprehension, math, and science, to ensure that students become functionally literate.

This call comes after a report by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), revealing that 18.96 million students who finished junior and senior high school can read but have difficulties in comprehension and understanding.

These students were called “functionally illiterate.”

The committee attributed this predicament to the “congested” basic education curriculum.

“It’s the education system that we have. We have too many competencies, too many subjects,” the committee said in an interview. “We have been talking about critical thinking, forgetting that before we reach critical thinking, we have to first pass through the basics, which are functional literacy, basic literacy. I think that’s where we lost our way.”

The committee lamented that it has consistently suggested to DepEd to decongest the competencies in grades 1 to 3 and grades 11 and 12, as being jam-packed leaves little room for learners to master crucial subjects.

The committee proposed that subjects in grade 3 be limited to reading comprehension, math, science, and GMRC (good manners and right conduct), and that the current 31 subjects in the K-12 curriculum be slashed to just eight: four for grades 11 and four for grades 12.

The DepEd in April opened a public consultation over plans to revise the SHS curriculum. A reduction of core subjects from 15 to just five is among the key features in the draft.

The planned consolidated core subjects, including Effective Communication, Life Skills, General Mathematics, General Science, and Pag-aaral ng Kasaysayan at Lipunang Pilipino, will be taught throughout the entire academic year.

This modification aims to allot more time for the most essential topics.

The pilot implementation of the revised K-12 curriculum is reportedly set for School Year 2025-2026. Based on the initial results of the pilot, the DepEd will announce whether all senior high schools will be required to implement the new curriculum by SY 2026-2027.

The committee, however, viewed this move as ineffective, pointing out that the proposed revised curriculum is still cluttered, as the DepEd only crammed the 31 competencies into five.

The committee has been consistently calling for DepEd to consider its proposal, underscoring the “alarming” result of the PSA’s study highlighting the education department's lapses in equipping students with basic skills and ensuring they are functionally literate.

The PSA defines functional literacy as the ability of a student to read, write, compute, and comprehend, whereas basic literacy includes reading, writing with understanding, and performing basic arithmetic.

According to the committee, there is no need to pass a law to enable the DepEd to decongest the current curriculum.