Nearly 19 million Filipino high school graduates functionally illiterate: report

By Minh Nga May 5, 2025 | 03:10 pm PT

High school students in Manila, the Philippines in 2024. Photo by Reuters

As many as 18.9 million high school graduates in the Philippines failed to meet functional literacy standards, struggling with reading, writing, arithmetic, and comprehension skills.

The Philippine Statistics Authority's Functional Literacy, Education, and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) presented data on literacy levels and educational outcomes, conducted in the second half of 2024, during a Senate hearing on Basic Education last week.

In the survey, the PSA updated the definition of "functional literacy" to include higher-level comprehension skills, moving beyond basic reading, writing, and numeracy. Under the 2019 definition, high school graduates or junior high school completers were automatically categorized as functionally literate, but the 2024 definition does not include this automatic classification.

Using the old definition, PSA found that 79.135 million Filipinos, or 93.1% of those aged 10-64, were functionally literate in 2024. However, with the updated definition, this number dropped to 60.170 million, meaning that 18.9 million Filipinos are now considered functionally illiterate.

"There are approximately 5.8 million people who are not basically literate... If you look at functionally illiterate, there are 24.8 million who have problems comprehending... This is the gravity of our situation right now, and I support the new definition [of literacy] because now we have a good picture of where we are," said Committee Chairperson and Second Congressional Commission (EDCOM 2) Co-Chair Senator Sherwin Gatchalian during the hearing.

"There are high school and junior high school graduates who... did not pass the new definition of functional literacy... In other words, 18 million graduates from the system are not functionally literate," Gatchalian added, as quoted in a press release by the Senate of the Philippines.

Senator Loren Legarda called on the government to improve students’ "foundational learning" to address the "functional illiteracy" affecting 18.9 million graduates, according to PhilStar Global.

She lamented the FLEMMS results: "This is a painful indictment of our education system. It reveals a systemic failure that tells us school attendance and graduation no longer guarantee genuine learning."

On May 1, the Department of Education (DepEd) pledged to intensify literacy reforms following the alarming survey results.