10% of students yet to enrol two days before classes open

October 3, 2020

More than 10 percent of private and public school students have yet to enrol two days before classes open on Monday and Education Secretary Leonor Briones ordered officials to look for them.

"We know that there are a lot of children that were not yet registered (enrolled) in our private schools, but there are also more or less 400 to 450,000 formerly private school learners who enrolled to public schools," Education Undersecretary  Tonisito Umali, of DepEd said during a virtual briefing on Saturday.

"So (when we) combined, we have 24.72 million public and private school enrollees, and that’s like 89 percent of the numbers that we had for school year 2019 to 2020 which is, more or less, 27.7 million," he added.

Umali said  as of Friday DepEd has 22.5 million public school enrollees.\

" That is more or less 99.68 percent of the number of enrollees that we got for school year 2019-2020 which is 22,572,923, that is for that school year. If were going to include the private school, there are 2.16 million reported to us that is more then 50 percent," said Umali.

Umali said Briones ordered DepEd officials and personnel to look for these students who failed to enrol for 2020 to 2021 school year.

"We are almost there. We will look for them. That is what Ma’am Liling Briones said, we will look for these children who were not yet enrolled to explain to them, to give them options on how they can still continue their education," he added.

Umali said there are students who failed to get their self-learning modules amid the official opening of classes on Monday.

"As of third week of September, we have distributed around 533, 209, 023 self-learning modules and that’s like 80 percent on the 3rd or 4th weeks of September and now we believe that almost all of these have been distributed," he said.

"The distribution of our self-learning modules is one of the challenges in case the parents still fail to get the modules from the schools.That is why today (Saturday) until tomorrow (Sunday)  the Department of Education is working together with its partners with the local government in the whole country to ensure that these self learning modules will be provided to our students," he said. Robina Asido/DMS