Means of Instruction, Equipment and Infrastructure

Despite the rapid expansion of the public school system, out of 43,000 barangays nationwide, more than 12,000 rural barangays (27%) do not have an elementary school. In 1993/94, about 34.5% of public elementary schools were incomplete, i.e. not offering the full six-year elementary programme. At the secondary level, 61 or 3.4% of the 1,800 municipalities in the country are without either public or private high schools, while 175 municipalities or 9.7% of these 1,800 municipalities are without a public high school.

A the elementary and secondary levels, the availability of textbooks has been assured thanks to the Education for All Programme. However, other basic educational requirements such as school buildings, teachers and instructional equipment have not been fully provided. This led to the adoption of measures like increasing class sizes, holding multiple shifts and assigning teaching overloads. Even with such measures, school buildings and teachers are still inadequate. During the school year 1992/93, assuming a class size of 50 students, there was a shortage of close to 3,900 classrooms in public elementary schools, and 4,100 classrooms in secondary schools, while more than 6,500 teachers were needed in public high schools.

Failure of the education sector to modernize was evident in the past because of the absence of some basic services, facilities and equipment which proved crucial to efforts at maximizing the advantages of technological developments. The Master Plan for Basic Education (1996-2005) has the mandate of modernizing education, notably by introducing modern instructional materials which include computers and Internet, videos, well-equipped science laboratories and machine shops as well as libraries to enrich instruction. Information and telecommunication systems will also serve as basic tools for carrying out educational administration and supervision.

The current situation in the country is that new information technologies have only affected a negligible fraction of the education system. Only 0.03% and 16.2% of public elementary and secondary schools, respectively, have computers and only 1.9% and 53.4% of public elementary and public secondary schools, respectively, have science laboratories. Computer literacy is just now growing in importance and very few teachers have adequate training and access to computers. The teachers can avail of computers and other information technology facilities in a few public schools and elite private schools.