CRLA results for SY 2025-26 in Region VII (Central Visayas) put the region almost level with the country, but the average joins two very different places. On the Comprehensive Rapid Literacy Assessment (CRLA), the reading screen DepEd gives in Grades 1–3, 10.4% of the region’s 320,467 public school learners were struggling readers, against 10.0% nationally. Bohol (2.5%) is among the lowest-share divisions in the country, while metropolitan Cebu holds Talisay City (22.5%) as well as the high-share divisions of Cebu City and Lapu-Lapu City.
The region ranks 12 of the 18 regions, counting from the one with the lowest share of struggling readers, and 44.6% of its learners read at grade level, against 47.6% nationally. Two more features stand out. Filipino is the weak spot: both Filipino blocks trail the national share at grade level by more than any other block. And as reported, schools with a principal have a higher share of struggling readers than schools without one, the reverse of the national pattern.
Key findings
- Both Filipino blocks are furthest below the national share at grade level: Grade 3 Filipino (-5.6 points) and Grade 2 Filipino at -5.5 points, while Grade 1 Mother Tongue (-1.4 points) is closest.
- The divisions more than five points from the regional share are Bohol (2.5%); Cebu City (18.2%); Mandaue City (4.0%); Talisay City (22.5%).
- The region has 41 low-low and 0 high-high cluster municipalities, and every low-low one is in Bohol.
- Within divisions, more learners per teacher and per classroom go with more struggling readers, while larger schools and schools in second- and fourth-class municipalities, compared with first-class ones, go with fewer: learners per teacher: odds ratio 1.34 (1.21–1.49); learners per classroom: odds ratio 1.09 (1.03–1.15); school size: odds ratio 0.81 (0.76–0.86); income class 2nd: odds ratio 0.61 (0.49–0.76); income class 4th: odds ratio 0.71 (0.56–0.90).
- 45.8% of schools report a School Principal, above the national 40.7%; unadjusted, 11.0% of their learners were struggling readers against 8.8% in schools without one.
- Region VII has 640 schools with no struggling reader where a model that lets schools differ expects about 469, a ratio of 1.37.
CRLA reading levels by grade and language in Region VII
All five grade-and-language blocks in Region VII fall short of the national share at grade level, though not by the same margin. The table sets each block’s five reading levels beside the regional and national totals; struggling readers are those at Low Emerging or High Emerging.
| Grade and language | Learners | Low Emerging | High Emerging | Developing | Transitioning | At Grade Level | Struggling |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grade 1 Mother Tongue | 96,635 | 8.9% | 6.5% | 13.6% | 27.0% | 44.0% | 15.5% |
| Grade 2 Mother Tongue | 100,595 | 6.6% | 2.4% | 11.3% | 35.3% | 44.4% | 9.1% |
| Grade 2 Filipino | 108,741 | 6.5% | 2.5% | 11.7% | 37.7% | 41.6% | 9.0% |
| Grade 3 Filipino | 115,230 | 4.4% | 1.6% | 7.4% | 41.5% | 45.2% | 6.0% |
| Grade 3 English | 115,091 | 5.1% | 2.5% | 8.7% | 36.0% | 47.8% | 7.5% |
| Region VII, all learners | 320,467 | 6.7% | 3.7% | 11.2% | 33.9% | 44.6% | 10.4% |
| Philippines, all learners | 5,127,670 | 6.9% | 3.1% | 10.4% | 32.0% | 47.6% | 10.0% |
Grade 3 Filipino (-5.6 points) is furthest behind, with 45.2% at grade level against 50.8% nationally, and Grade 2 Filipino trails by almost as much. Grade 1 Mother Tongue (-1.4 points) is nearest the national figure.
Grade 1 Mother Tongue still has the largest struggling share, 15.5%, as it does nationally (14.4%). In Grade 3, more of the region’s learners stop at Transitioning, one level short of grade level, than learners nationally.
Schools divisions in Region VII
Region VII’s 12 divisions include two very large provincial divisions, Cebu and Bohol, and a set of city divisions. Cebu is the largest division in the country, with 121,080 learners assessed. The table gives each division’s empirical Bayes estimate, which steadies small divisions, and its rank among the 232 divisions, both with 95% intervals.
| Division | Schools | Learners | Struggling readers | Share struggling | Estimate (95% interval) | National rank of 232 (95% interval) | National funnel |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bogo City | 23 | 4,489 | 328 | 7.3% | 7.3% (6.6%–8.1%) | 76 (65–97) | within limits |
| Bohol | 930 | 59,388 | 1,491 | 2.5% | 2.5% (2.4%–2.6%) | 11 (8–14) | within limits |
| Carcar City | 33 | 7,864 | 609 | 7.7% | 7.8% (7.2%–8.4%) | 87 (75–104) | within limits |
| Cebu | 898 | 121,080 | 13,309 | 11.0% | 11.0% (10.8%–11.2%) | 160 (158–166) | within limits |
| Cebu City | 68 | 42,212 | 7,687 | 18.2% | 18.2% (17.8%–18.6%) | 216 (215–219) | within limits |
| City of Naga, Cebu | 29 | 7,067 | 607 | 8.6% | 8.6% (7.9%–9.2%) | 110 (92–130) | within limits |
| Danao City | 45 | 8,525 | 546 | 6.4% | 6.4% (5.9%–7.0%) | 60 (52–73) | within limits |
| Lapu-Lapu City | 44 | 24,798 | 3,650 | 14.7% | 14.7% (14.3%–15.2%) | 204 (199–208) | within limits |
| Mandaue City | 27 | 15,568 | 629 | 4.0% | 4.1% (3.8%–4.4%) | 30 (24–35) | within limits |
| Tagbilaran City | 16 | 3,889 | 270 | 6.9% | 7.0% (6.2%–7.8%) | 75 (56–88) | within limits |
| Talisay City | 26 | 13,051 | 2,933 | 22.5% | 22.4% (21.7%–23.2%) | 224 (224–225) | within limits |
| Toledo City | 50 | 12,536 | 1,331 | 10.6% | 10.6% (10.1%–11.2%) | 156 (148–165) | within limits |
Division shares stretch from 2.5% to 22.5%. Bohol and Mandaue City sit far below the regional share, Cebu City and Talisay City far above it. By count, Cebu (13,309 struggling readers) leads because of its size.
Even so, the count of divisions outside the national funnel’s 95% limits is 0. Those limits allow for the wide spread between divisions nationwide, so Talisay City is high for the country but within the usual range.
Languages of instruction
Language barely varies here: Sinugbuanong Binisaya (98% of schools) is used almost everywhere, and only 2 languages are reported by enough schools to appear in the table. The few Tagalog-medium schools have a higher struggling share, but too few to say much.
| Language of instruction | Schools | Learners | Share struggling | At Grade Level |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sinugbuanong Binisaya | 2,146 | 312,265 | 10.3% | 44.5% |
| Tagalog | 34 | 6,217 | 13.4% | 46.0% |
With nearly every school teaching in Cebuano in the early grades, Filipino is not the home language of most learners, which is consistent with the weak Filipino blocks above. Where a school assessed Grade 2 in both languages, subtracting the Mother Tongue share at grade level from the Filipino share leaves -2.5 points, compared with -0.8 for the country. This gap matters more now that RA 12027 of 2024 has discontinued the mother tongue as the medium of instruction from Kindergarten to Grade 3 outside monolingual classes that meet the law’s requirements; CRLA by Language looks at it nationally.
Where struggling readers are concentrated in Region VII
The map shows the estimated share of struggling readers in each of the region’s 101 municipalities and cities, on the national color scale. Estimates for places with few learners are pulled toward the national share, so one unusual class does not color a whole town. These are statements about places, not any child.
The largest numbers of struggling readers are all in Cebu, most of them in its metropolitan cities: Cebu City (Capital), Cebu (7,687); Lapu-Lapu City (Opon), Cebu (3,650); City of Talisay, Cebu (2,933); Toledo City, Cebu (1,331); Consolacion, Cebu (1,211). Cebu, counting its cities, also has all five of the highest estimated shares: City of Talisay, Cebu (22.5%); Cebu City (Capital), Cebu (18.2%); Balamban, Cebu (17.6%); Liloan, Cebu (17.6%); Consolacion, Cebu (16.2%).
A cluster test (local Moran’s I, with a 5% false discovery rate) finds 0 high-high and 41 low-low municipalities. Every low-low one is in Bohol, the province with the most low-low municipalities in the country. The high shares around Cebu City do not form a high-high cluster; they sit beside lower ones, such as Mandaue City’s. For how the test works, see CRLA Reading Hotspots.
Early childhood: stunting and day care centers
Two early-childhood measures sit on the same dashboard: stunting among children aged 0–2 weighed and measured in OPT Plus 2025, run under the National Nutrition Council, and the DILG list of barangays with no child development center (CDC), the barangay day care center. The table shows both for Bohol and Cebu.
| Province or highly urbanized city | Children 0–2 measured | Stunted | Barangays without a CDC | Learners struggling |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bohol | 32,034 | 4.3% | 35 of 1,109 | 2.8% |
| Cebu | 147,633 | 4.6% | 103 of 1,203 | 12.3% |
Stunting is not unusual here: 4.6% of 179,667 children measured were stunted, against 4.3% nationally, and the higher province is Cebu (4.6%). Only 6.0% of barangays, 138 of 2,312, have no CDC, well under the national 10.9%.
Bohol and Cebu have similar stunting but very different reading results. The children weighed in 2025 are not the learners assessed in Grades 1–3, so the comparison is between places only; Stunting, Day Care Centers and Early Reading examines it nationally.
School resources
The table draws on DepEd’s SY 2023-24 school files, so it describes schools as they were two school years before these results.
| School input (SY 2023-24) | Region VII | Philippines |
|---|---|---|
| Learners per teacher (elementary) | 23.1 | 22.8 |
| Learners per classroom (elementary) | 25.9 | 25.8 |
| Schools with internet | 80.1% | 76.3% |
| Schools with electricity | 98.7% | 97.6% |
| Schools with a water supply | 98.0% | 97.8% |
| Schools with no functional toilet | 1.3% | 2.3% |
| Schools with multigrade classes | 11.3% | 15.3% |
On crowding, Region VII sits near the national median, at 23.1 learners per teacher and 25.9 per classroom (national: 22.8 and 25.8). Internet reaches 80.1% of its schools, against 76.3%, while multigrade classes are less common (11.3% against 15.3%).
Region VII’s own model sets each school against others in its division, and an odds ratio above 1 signals more struggling readers. Its intervals are widened for overdispersion, the extra spread between schools (quasi-binomial errors). For 5 inputs the 95% interval excludes 1, giving these odds ratios and intervals: learners per teacher: odds ratio 1.34 (1.21–1.49); learners per classroom: odds ratio 1.09 (1.03–1.15); school size: odds ratio 0.81 (0.76–0.86); income class 2nd: odds ratio 0.61 (0.49–0.76); income class 4th: odds ratio 0.71 (0.56–0.90). Learners per teacher, learners per classroom and school size are logged and taken per standard deviation, and the income-class terms compare schools in second- and fourth-class municipalities with schools in first-class ones.
These are associations within divisions, not effects, and each points the same way as the national model’s. The national results are in School Resources and CRLA Reading Results.
School heads
A larger share of Region VII’s schools have a principal than in the country as a whole: 45.8% of its schools listed a School Principal position in SY 2023-24, against 40.7% nationally, and 30.8% had no head position.
The raw comparison runs the other way from the national one: before any adjustment, learners in schools with a principal were more often struggling readers (11.0%) than learners in schools without one (8.8%). Principals tend to lead large urban schools, and here those include the high-share city divisions, which may explain much of the reversal. For a national comparison that adjusts for those differences, see CRLA Results in Schools With and Without a Principal.
Programs recorded in Region VII
The EDCOM II list of programs reported by NGOs and corporate foundations has 9 entries in Region VII, 9.0% of the list, against 6.5% of the country’s struggling readers. By category: Literacy (5); Nutrition (3); Childcare (1). By type: Literacy Tutoring Program (3); Growth Monitoring & Weighing (2); Book/Reading Material Donation (2); Stunting Prevention Program (1); Day Care Worker Training (1).
The list records what was reported, not every program, and it cannot show whether any of them worked. How the list lines up with need in every region is covered in Literacy and Nutrition Programs Compared With Need.
What this means for school heads in Region VII
The regional average is a poor guide for any single school here, because it blends Bohol’s low shares with metropolitan Cebu’s high ones.
- In the high-share cities, plan for numbers. Cebu City, Lapu-Lapu City and Talisay City each count thousands of struggling readers, so reading support has to be organized at scale.
- Give Filipino its own attention. The Filipino blocks trail the country most, in Grade 2 and Grade 3 alike.
- Ask what low-share places do. Bohol and Mandaue City are natural places to learn from, and to check how the screen was given and recorded.
- Check records with no struggling reader. The region reports more such schools than expected, and a quick review keeps the data credible.
- Compare with your own division. With division shares this far apart, the division is the fairer yardstick.
How these numbers were made
Every reading figure here is a public-school CRLA result from the end of SY 2025-26, read from the EDCOM II early-childhood (ECCD) dashboard as of 10 May 2026. Totals use one block per grade, Grade 1 Mother Tongue, Grade 2 Filipino and Grade 3 English, so no learner is counted twice. The PSGC’s 18 regions are used, with NIR separate from Region VII and Sulu in Region IX. The school inputs and school-head categories are taken from DepEd’s SY 2023-24 files. Both CRLA End-of-Year Results SY 2025-26 and How to Read a School’s CRLA Results Fairly walk through the estimation methods.
Limits
Because the CRLA reaches nearly every learner, the regional and provincial shares are population figures, not samples. The inputs are two school years older than the results, and the within-division model cannot account for everything that differs between schools. Stunting figures describe younger children than the learners assessed. Region VII’s surplus of schools reporting no struggling reader calls for a records check, not suspicion; the method is in CRLA Schools With No Struggling Readers.
Frequently asked questions
How does Region VII compare with the national CRLA results?
Region VII’s struggling share was 10.4% at the end of SY 2025-26, against 10.0% nationally, and 44.6% of its learners read at grade level, against 47.6%. The region ranks 12 of the 18 regions.
Why is Bohol’s share of struggling readers so low?
The data show the pattern but not its cause: Bohol (2.5%) is the region’s lowest division share, and its municipalities form a large low-low cluster. Differences in teaching and in how the screen was given could both play a part, so the result deserves study and a records check.
Which Region VII division has the most struggling readers?
By count, Cebu (13,309 struggling readers), the largest division in the country. By share, Talisay City (22.5%) is highest.
Why do schools with a principal show more struggling readers in Region VII?
The figures are unadjusted. Schools with a principal are larger and more often urban, and the region’s high shares are concentrated in its cities, so the raw gap may reflect location more than leadership.
Download the data
The cleaned EDCOM II dashboard data behind this series are free to download for personal study; to reuse them, email support@nash.com.ph for written permission first. How the EDCOM Dashboard Data Was Cleaned explains every table and cleaning rule. The files are at data.nash.com.ph: start with the README, then the school table with CRLA results and school inputs (Parquet), the school estimates (CSV), the division estimates (CSV) and the municipal table (CSV). The DepEd school files used for school inputs are described in Download Cleaned DepEd School Data.
Every file, with its rows, columns and checksum, is listed on the EDCOM II CRLA data page. To cite the data: Llego, M. A. (2026). EDCOM II early-childhood dashboard data, cleaned, version 1. NASH Reviewer. https://nash.com.ph/edcom-data
More in this series
- CRLA End-of-Year Results SY 2025-26: All 18 Regions
- CRLA Start vs End of SY 2025-26 in the Same Schools
- CRLA by Language: Mother Tongue, Filipino and English
- How to Read a School’s CRLA Results Fairly
- CRLA Variation: School, Division or Region?
- Where Struggling Readers Are Concentrated
- School Resources and CRLA Reading Results
- CRLA Results in Schools With and Without a Principal
- Action Research and Thesis Topics on Reading (CRLA)
- CRLA Reading Hotspots: A Map of Struggling Readers
- Stunting, Day Care Centers and Early Reading
- Literacy and Nutrition Programs Compared With Need
- CRLA Schools With No Struggling Readers: A Data Check
- How the EDCOM Dashboard Data Was Cleaned
- Regional reports: NCR, CAR, Region I, Region II, Region III, Region IV-A, MIMAROPA, Region V, Region VI, NIR, Region VII, Region VIII, Region IX, Region X, Region XI, Region XII, Caraga, BARMM
- Earlier reports: CRLA Results SY 2025-2026 (DepEd’s selected-school file), Do the Same DepEd Schools Lag on the ELLNA, NAT and CRLA?, DepEd School Inputs vs Test Results, EDCOM II Final Report: Guide for Aspiring School Heads, DepEd Data for Aspiring School Heads: Where to Start
Analysis and charts by Mark Anthony Llego for NASH Reviewer. Data: EDCOM II early-childhood dashboard and Department of Education public datasets. NASH Reviewer is not affiliated with EDCOM II or DepEd. Charts may be reused only with written permission from support@nash.com.ph.