Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte previously said that the promise of the K-12 curriculum to produce employable graduates still remained a promise.
According to Jocelyn Andaya, director of the DepEd’s Bureau of Curriculum Development, enrollment in the technical vocational and livelihood track for SHS students has declined over the past years since K-12 was implemented in the country.Based on DepEd’s 2021-2022 data, the majority of SHS learners, or 70.59 percent, chose the academic track while only 28.93 percent were in TVL.
“We need feedback if we just need to go back to academic again because it’s a pity if we need to go back to that because the industry needs workers and the SHS is a viable option for employment,” she said in December 2022 during the agency’s consultation with industry partners for the K-12 review.But at the moment, Andaya said the preferred path of the graduates is pursuing higher education after high school “simply because culturally, parents would prefer … seeing diplomas hung on the walls.