Approximately 18 million Filipinos who are graduates from the country's basic education system could be functionally illiterate, according to data from the Functional Literacy, Education, and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS).

This was found by the Senate Committee on Basic Education during its April 30 hearing on the initial results of the latest FLEMMS by the Philippine Statistics Authority in the second half of 2024.

The hearing, led by Committee Chairperson and Second Congressional Commission (EDCOM 2) co-chair Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, sought to investigate the survey's implications on learners in the country's basic education system. The FLEMMS is a national survey administered by the PSA that gathers information on the basic and functional literacy rates, and the educational skills qualifications of the population.

"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", Gatchalian said.

In its latest iteration, the PSA changed the definition of "functional literacy" to include higher-level comprehension skills, going beyond basic reading, writing, and numeracy. Critically, the 2019 definition automatically categorizes high school graduates or junior high school completers as functionally literate, while the 2024 definition does not.

"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 said.

Using the old definition, PSA found that there are 79 million Filipinos who are functionally literate in 2024. Using the new definition, which removes the automatic categorization of high school graduates, this number shrank to 60 million.

PSA's Adrian Cerezo of the Social Sector Statistics Service validated this, noting that 21% of our senior high school graduates are not functionally literate, based on distilled FLEMMS data.

"And that's a problem of basic education - because paano sila nag-graduate nang hindi sila functionally literate?...This is where basic education comes in, that 18 million should not happen. No one should graduate in our basic education system that is functionally literate," he continued. Senate of the Philippines