Education Secretary Sonny Angara is urging Congress to restore funding for the government’s learning recovery program, saying recent gains by Filipino students in an international assessment should not obscure the large number who still struggle with basic skills.

The Department of Education is seeking 16.03 billion pesos in supplemental funding for learning recovery in 2027, mainly for its Academic Recovery and Accessible Learning, or ARAL, Program. The program received no funding in the National Expenditure Program submitted for next year.

“These latest PISA gains are an encouraging checkpoint, not the finish line,” Angara said Tuesday.

“They prove that system-wide progress is possible, but they also highlight why sustained funding and structured interventions like ARAL remain nonnegotiable.”

The proposed 16.03 billion pesos would fund remediation consultations, learning materials, training for DepEd tutors, the ARAL Summer Program, compensation for external tutors and honoraria for teachers who take on additional workloads.

DepEd said ARAL was part of its learning recovery efforts during the 2025-26 school year. The department reported that the number of struggling readers fell from 6.7 million to 2.2 million, while the number of learners assessed as ready for grade-level reading increased from 3.3 million to 5.8 million.

The figures come from DepEd assessments and are separate from PISA, which measures the performance of 15-year-old students across participating education systems.

DepEd is also expanding literacy measures, including the distribution of storybooks to kindergarten through Grade 3 learners, the establishment of Reading Nooks and the Bayang Bumabasa initiative.

At the same time, DepEd is seeking 11.43 billion pesos under the proposed 2027 budget for its School-Based Feeding Program, which would cover about 3.69 million learners, including all kindergarten and Grade 1 pupils and wasted and severely wasted learners from Grade 2 onward.

The request follows the release of the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment, which showed the Philippines making its largest gains in reading, mathematics and science since it began participating in PISA in 2018.

The country’s reading score rose 20 points from 2022 to 367, while mathematics increased 16 points to 371 and science rose 17 points to 373, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The Philippines also recorded a 38-point improvement in reading over its 10-year PISA trend, the largest improvement among participating education systems.

Despite the gains, most Filipino 15-year-olds remained below the minimum proficiency level in all three subjects.

Only 31% reached at least Level 2 proficiency in reading, compared with 69% across OECD countries. In mathematics, 21% reached the benchmark, compared with 65% in OECD countries. In science, the figure was 32%, compared with 74%.