DepEd seeking 10-M ALS students
The task of finding the unenrolled students and teaching them basic education now falls on ALS teachers.
ALS students are not required to be in the community learning center like this newly built one in Agusan del Norte.
Photograph courtesy of DepEd
Where are the 9.5 million out-of-school youths (OSYs) that are supposed to be enrolled in the Department of Education’s Alternative Learning System (ALS)?
Finding them is the biggest challenge facing the Bureau of Alternative Education (BAE) as there are only 600,000 enrolled in the ALS last year when the Philippine Statistics Authority counts 10 million OSYs in the country.
The task of finding the unenrolled students and teaching them basic education now falls on ALS teachers, Andrew A. Villarba, BAE chief education program specialist, admitted during a press conference on inclusive education hosted by the United Nations Philippines in Makati City last month.
“To find learners, we are very different from the formal school. For the formal school, the learners will go to school. When the teacher comes in, she or he has already students in her/his class. But for the alternative learning system, the ALS teachers will be the one to look for the learners,” Villarba explained.
ALS teachers are tasked to do community mapping or go house-to-house to find adults or youth who have not completed their basic education, and register them with ALS, he said.
Another challenge of ALS teachers is, even if they identified the OSYs and adults in the community, they could have other priorities already like working.
“It would be difficult for us to convince them to go back because their primary goal is to provide food on the table for the family,” Villarba said.
Nevertheless, the BAE is conducting literacy mapping.
“We are already coordinating with the local government units and the National Youth Commission to help us map and identify these out-of-school youths,” he said.
Villarba called on all OSYs to enroll in ALS whatever circumstances they are in.
“We are improving the implementation of our programs so that with the different teaching modalities that we offer for our learners, they would not be required to report daily, the schedule of their classes is flexible,” he said. “They are not required to be in school or in the community learning center every day, but there are other modalities that they can use in order for them to learn. Number one is independent learning. So they have modular, online, asynchronous and synchronous, and other modalities.”
The BAE is also hoping that learning modules produced by UNESCO and other partners would encourage OSYs to be in the program and finish basic education, Villarba added.