Here is a reading order for the 47 posts in this DepEd data series, written for teachers and school heads preparing for the National Assessment for School Heads, the NASH (formerly NQESH). The series asks what the public datasets of the Department of Education (DepEd) can tell someone who wants to lead a school. Nine years of enrollment files, five school-level modules for SY 2023-2024, and the published results of three assessments answer a great deal.
Every post in the series uses the same cleaned data, which you can download as CSV and Parquet files. The numbers are DepEd’s, the schools and scenarios in the practice items are invented, and every chart can be traced back to a script. Use the order below if you are new to the data. Skip to the section you need if you are not. A second series of 31 posts, built on the EDCOM II early-childhood dashboard’s end-of-year reading results, is in section 7.
1. If you have ten minutes: two posts to read first
Read How to Read DepEd Data first. It uses the series’ own charts to explain what an enrollment file is and why a school mean from six test-takers means little. It also shows how to compare a division with its neighbors and where each dataset ends. Everything else in the series assumes you can read a table the way that guide teaches.
Then read DepEd Enrollment Trends SY 2017-2018 to SY 2025-2026, the report that the rest of the series builds on. Enrollment peaked in SY 2022-2023 and has fallen since. The private sector lost a fifth of its learners in one year and has recovered half of them. Every region except BARMM now has fewer learners than at the peak.
2. DepEd enrollment reports, one per school year
There are nine reports, one per school year. Each covers what changed in that year rather than repeating the same paragraphs with different numbers. Read them in order for the whole period, or pick the year you started teaching.
- SY 2017-18: 26.3 Million Learners: the baseline, the first full senior high cohort, and a small Grade 1 class that the series follows all the way to Grade 9.
- SY 2018-19: Growth to 27.0 Million: Marawi’s recovery, and the first city divisions separated from Laguna and Negros Occidental.
- SY 2019-20: The Pre-Pandemic Peak: 1,422 private schools in their last year, Mati City’s schools transferred to Davao Oriental.
- SY 2020-21: The Pandemic Drop: private enrollment down 21.6%, NCR down 245,675 learners, every grade-to-grade flow at its low.
- SY 2021-22: Rebound to 27.6 Million: flow ratios above one as learners came back, and the Special Geographic Area appears.
- SY 2022-23: The Peak at 27.8 Million: 27.79 million, and the decline that followed.
- SY 2023-24: The Decline Begins: the year of the module files, and Makati’s barangays move to Taguig.
- SY 2024-25: Smallest Kindergarten Class: 1.83 million, and what a shrinking intake does to the grades above it.
- SY 2025-26: Below the 2017 Level: the Strengthened Senior High School reclassification, Sulu under Region IX, and a system smaller than when the series began.
Three posts take the enrollment files further than a single year:
- Enrollment Projected to SY 2031-32: the cohorts already in school imply 23.1 to 24.1 million learners by then, with Grade 7 and Grade 12 falling most.
- Schools Division League Tables: all 231 divisions ranked by nine-year growth and by SY 2023-24 inputs, and why the two rankings disagree.
- Enrollment by Province and Legislative District: the tables that match how governors and representatives see schools.
3. What the SY 2023-2024 DepEd school files show
There are five modules, each with one row per public school. These five reports read them first:
- Learner Data: Who Fills Public Schools: learner types, class structure, school size.
- Teachers and School Personnel: positions, ranks, who pays for whom.
- School Facilities: Classrooms and Buildings: the classroom ratio, building condition, makeshift rooms.
- WASH and Utilities: water, toilets, handwashing, electricity, internet.
- ICT: Computers and Internet: what the computers are for and who funded them.
The same files hold columns that those reports did not cover. Nine later posts use them:
- IP, ALIVE and Balik-Aral Learners by Grade: where returning learners re-enter, where the IP share falls, and how small the alternative delivery modes are.
- Who Leads Public Schools?: a principal position in 43% of schools, and the rest.
- Counselors, Nurses, Librarians: the support positions that most schools do not have.
- What LGUs Pay For: locally funded teachers and staff, by type and region.
- Schools per District Supervisor and Division: the supervisory load, from districts of two schools to districts of eighty.
- How Learners Reach School: road types, boat-only access, hard-to-reach schools, safety features.
- School Toilets for Girls, Boys and PWD Learners: learners per bowl by sex and region, and the schools with no toilet for a learner in a wheelchair.
- DepEd Smart TVs and Computers vs National Education Plan: smart TVs, computers and connections against what the plan promises by 2028.
- Private School Closures in 2020: DepEd Enrollment Data: closures explain 7% of the private loss, and public schools absorbed about one learner in eight at once.
4. DepEd assessment results: NAT, ELLNA and CRLA
DepEd has published school-level results for three assessments: the National Achievement Test (NAT), the Early Language, Literacy, and Numeracy Assessment (ELLNA), and the Comprehensive Rapid Literacy Assessment (CRLA). Here are the reports and the analyses that join them to the school files:
- NAT Grade 6 Results 2023-24 and ELLNA 2023-24: mean scores by division, with the margin of error that a small school’s mean carries.
- CRLA 2025-26: Early Reading Levels: one Grade 1 learner in twenty reads at grade level in the five regions covered. The end-of-year results for every public school show that DepEd’s file is most likely an earlier round of the same school year.
- Which School Inputs Go With Test Results?: internet access does, computers per learner do not, and why that is an association and not a cause.
- NAT Grade 6 SY 2023-2024: Private vs Public School Scores: the finding most readers do not expect, with the sample caveats that go with it.
- Do the Same DepEd Schools Lag on the ELLNA, NAT and CRLA?: schools that lag on the Grade 3 ELLNA tend to lag on the Grade 6 NAT as well; the CRLA reading screen does not follow the same pattern.
- Who Takes STEM? Senior High Strands by Sex: girls became the majority in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) over nine years, while Technical-Vocational-Livelihood (TVL) moved in the opposite direction.
- DepEd Open Data Quality: Errors, Blanks and Coverage Limits: the quality audit behind every caveat in the series.
5. Guides and practice sets for the NASH
The NASH is a developmental assessment. It tests whether a candidate is ready for a school leadership role and tells them where to improve. The guides below connect the data to the Philippine Professional Standards for School Heads (PPSSH), which the assessment is built on.
- NASH Study Guide: the 2025 NASH Memorandum and the PPSSH: the memorandum explained, and the study plan.
- The five domain guides: Domain 1, Leading Strategically; Domain 2, School Operations; Domain 3, Teaching and Learning; Domain 4, Developing Self and Others; Domain 5, Building Connections.
- EDCOM II Final Report: Guide for Aspiring School Heads and National Education Plan 2026-2035: Guide for School Heads: the two documents that will shape the policy questions of the next decade, read against the data.
- Practice: NASH Practice Questions With Answers: 50 Items on the PPSSH, one PPSSH indicator per item, scored 3-2-1-0 with full explanations. NASH Practice Test Set B: 50 PPSSH Items With Answer Keys adds 50 more items written from the newer analyses.
6. Download the cleaned DepEd data
Download Cleaned DepEd School Data gives every file in CSV and Parquet with a codebook, cleaning rules and checksums, and sets out the terms of use. The one-page report with every chart is on the app at Philippine basic education in numbers.
7. The EDCOM II CRLA series: reading at the end of SY 2025-26
The EDCOM II early-childhood dashboard holds the end-of-year CRLA results for 38,679 public schools: 5,127,670 learners in Grades 1 to 3, of whom 511,753 (10.0%) are struggling readers at the Low or High Emerging level. A second series of 31 posts reads that data with the same methods and caveats as the DepEd series. Start with these:
- CRLA End-of-Year Results SY 2025-26: All 18 Regions: national, regional and division results by grade and language.
- How to Read a School’s CRLA Results Fairly: why a small school’s share means little on its own, and how to read an estimate with its interval.
- CRLA Start vs End of SY 2025-26 in the Same Schools: how reading changed during the year in the 6,061 schools of DepEd’s selected-school file.
- Where Struggling Readers Are Concentrated and CRLA Reading Hotspots: where support would reach the most learners.
- CRLA Results in Schools With and Without a Principal: a like-with-like comparison written for aspiring school heads.
- How the EDCOM Dashboard Data Was Cleaned: the extraction, the cleaning rules and the download.
Every post in that series ends with links to the rest of it, including one report for each of the 18 regions.
How to cite this series
Every post ends with a credit line. The short form is: Mark Anthony Llego, NASH Reviewer, “title of the post”, nash.com.ph/blog, 2026, analysis of Department of Education public datasets. Charts carry the credit in their footer and in the PNG metadata; to reuse them, email support@nash.com.ph for written permission.
Series by Mark Anthony Llego for NASH Reviewer. Data: Department of Education public datasets, SY 2017-18 to SY 2025-26.