DepEd data: Philippine basic education in numbers

Two facts limit every finding. First, the assessment files cover only five regions: CAR, Region I, Region III, Region VIII and Region IX. Within those regions, they cover 44 of the 63 divisions and about half of the public Grade 3 schools. Second, the personnel, facilities, ICT (information and communications technology) and WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) files hold a row for every school. They have data for public schools only, as the technical notes state.

School IDs match across files. The six SY 2023-24 files hold the same 60,167 schools, and every NAT and ELLNA school matches one of them. Over the nine years, 66,967 distinct school IDs appear, and 55,029 schools are present in every year.

Region boundaries changed during the period. ARMM became BARMM in SY 2019-20, and Cotabato City moved to BARMM in SY 2021-22. The Negros Island Region took 21 divisions from Regions VI and VII in SY 2024-25, and Sulu moved to Region IX in SY 2025-26. Every regional series on this page uses the SY 2025-26 boundaries, so each line compares the same places in every year.

Mark Anthony Llego analyzed the data and drew the charts for NASH Reviewer (https://nash.com.ph/). The report was published on 25 October 2026 from the datasets listed under Sources. The full pipeline, data dictionary and quality audit can be re-run from the raw files.

Over the eight years, the compound change in enrollment is −0.18% a year. The year-by-year changes say more than the average. Enrollment grew 1.4% a year before the pandemic, fell 3.0% in SY 2020-21 and rebounded 5.1% in SY 2021-22. Since SY 2022-23 it has fallen 2.3% a year. Excluding the two pandemic years from a fitted trend changes the long-run rate by only 0.03 points, so the pandemic does not explain the decline.

Kindergarten enrollment fell from 2.27 million to 1.99 million, or 1.6% a year, which is consistent with fewer births. Those smaller cohorts are now moving up through the elementary grades. Elementary enrollment is 14.3 million, 1.4 million below SY 2017-18.

Senior high school is the only level that grew. It rose from 2.73 million to 3.83 million, or 4.3% a year, as the first full cohorts moved through Grades 11 and 12. Senior high also accounted for most of the SY 2021-22 rebound: it added 588,000 learners in that one year.

The SY 2025-26 file leaves out 46 schools that reported no enrollment. Their SY 2024-25 total was about 465 learners, too small to change any figure on this page.

The private share of enrollment was 15.9% in SY 2019-20, 12.0% in SY 2021-22 and 14.5% in SY 2025-26. Private enrollment in SY 2025-26 is 3.76 million, still 13% below its SY 2019-20 level of 4.30 million.

In SY 2020-21, 1,422 private schools that were in the SY 2019-20 file were absent. They had 67,236 learners in their last year. Of the 1,711 schools of all sectors that left that year, 194 later returned, so some had paused rather than closed.

Public enrollment ends the period almost where it began: 22.10 million in SY 2017-18 and 22.08 million in SY 2025-26, after a peak of 24.13 million in SY 2021-22. Schools managed by state and local universities and colleges lost half of their enrollment, from 149,614 to 73,060.

The 55,029 schools present in all nine years shrank by 0.46% a year, faster than the system as a whole at 0.18%. New schools therefore account for part of the stability in the national total.

BARMM enrollment rose from 758,518 to 934,373, the only region with sustained growth. Region IV-A grew 0.4% a year and Region IX 0.3%. Region I lost 1.2% a year, and Regions VI and VIII lost 1.1%. Region V lost 0.9% a year, and CAR and NCR 0.8%.

Since SY 2022-23, every region except BARMM has lost enrollment. The losses range from 1.5% a year in Region IV-A to 3.5% a year in Region I.

Excluding the pandemic years changes no regional rate by more than 0.2 points. The gaps between regions reflect population change and migration, not the pandemic.

NCR has the highest private share: 26.5% of its learners were in private schools in SY 2025-26. Region VIII has the lowest, at 6.3%.

In every year, the female share is 48.1% to 48.2% in elementary. In junior high it is 49.0% to 50.3%. In senior high it fell from 52.9% in SY 2017-18 to 50.0% in SY 2023-24, then rose to 51.0% in SY 2025-26.

Grade 1 enrollment is higher than the previous year’s kindergarten, with ratios of 1.01 to 1.07, because over-age learners and children who skipped kindergarten enter at Grade 1. The only year below 1 was SY 2020-21.

The Grade 6 to Grade 7 ratio fell to 0.93 in SY 2020-21 and has been 0.97 to 0.98 since SY 2023-24. The Grade 10 to Grade 11 ratio also dropped to 0.93 in SY 2020-21. It rebounded to 1.08 the next year as learners who had paused returned.

The SY 2017-18 kindergarten cohort, followed one grade a year, reached Grade 8 in SY 2025-26 at 91% of its kindergarten size. That path includes repeaters and transfers, so it is a rough guide, not a survival rate.

DepEd computes the pupil–teacher ratio as total learners divided by total teachers. On that count, the public pupil–teacher ratio is 25.5, while the median school has 22.7 learners per teacher.

The same gap appears for classrooms and toilets. Nationally there are 35.1 learners per instructional room, but 27.2 in the median school. There are 27.4 learners per functional toilet bowl nationally, but 21.7 in the median school. The shortage is concentrated in large urban schools.

BARMM has the highest ratios on every count: 30.0 learners per teacher, 46.4 per classroom and 50.5 per toilet bowl. In BARMM, 19% of public schools report no functional toilet. NCR has the most crowded classrooms, with 55 learners per room, followed by Region IV-A with 45. CAR, with 19.4 learners per teacher, and Region VIII, with 21.2, have the most teachers for their learners.

Water and electricity reach almost every learner: 98% of public elementary learners attend a school that reports a water supply, and 98% attend one with electricity. Fewer schools have internet. Only 76% of public elementary schools, with 88% of learners, report a connection. The share of learners with a connected school ranges from 73% in Region IX to 98% in Region III.

Academic computers are scarce and unevenly spread. There are 6.6 per 100 learners nationally, but the median school has 2.3 per 100. In 25% of public schools there are none. One public school in 36, or 2.8%, reports no functional toilet bowl at all. Those schools hold 1.1% of learners.

Nationally, 2% of elementary learners are taught in multigrade classes. The share is 9% in Region VIII and 10% in CAR, where small mountain and island schools are common.

Region VIII ranks first on both tests, with an ELLNA mean of 69.9 and a NAT mean of 66.5. Region IX ranks last, with 54.4 and 53.9. The intervals are about one point wide, so these ranks are not in doubt. CAR, Region I and Region III have means between 56 and 63.

Across the 44 divisions, the ELLNA mean runs from 45.4 in Pagadian City to 81.3 in Ilocos Norte. The NAT mean runs from 45.8 in Candon City to 74.4 in Calbayog City. After adjusting for the 44 comparisons, 18 divisions are significantly below the pooled ELLNA mean and 14 are above it. For NAT, 18 are below and 13 above.

Differences between divisions account for 36% of the weighted variance in ELLNA school means and 27% in NAT. Differences between regions account for 8%. Most of the variation is between schools inside the same division, which is where a school head works.

Divisions in the middle of the table cannot be distinguished from each other: their 95% rank intervals span five to ten places. Only the top and bottom of the table should be read as a ranking.

The weakest subjects are ELLNA Numeracy at 53.6, NAT Science at 53.8 and NAT Mathematics at 56.4. Filipino is the strongest subject on both tests. Only 10% of assessed schools have a NAT Science mean of 75 or more.

Within the same schools, the ELLNA and NAT means correlate at 0.62. A school with low Grade 3 results tends to have low Grade 6 results too.

The gap is largest in Grade 1. Only 5.3% of Grade 1 learners read at grade level in Mother Tongue, with a 95% interval of 5.0% to 5.7%. In the same grade, 55.0% are low emerging, with an interval of 54.2% to 55.9%. By Grade 3, the share at grade level is 24.6% in Mother Tongue, 22.7% in Filipino and 23.3% in English. The share at low emerging falls to 13% to 16%.

By region, Region III has the highest share at grade level, 18.4%, and Region VIII the lowest, 12.7%. Region IX has the largest share of low-emerging readers, 34.2%. By language of instruction, Kapampangan schools are highest at 19.4% and Tagalog schools next at 17.3%. Waray schools are lowest at 12.0%.

The CRLA does not agree with the other two tests. At school level, its share at grade level correlates at only 0.06 with the SY 2023-24 ELLNA mean. Divisions at the top of ELLNA and NAT, such as Ilocos Norte and Calbayog City, are near the bottom on CRLA. The CRLA is a rapid screening test given by teachers, two years later, to different cohorts, and DepEd has not documented its school-level summary. Treat it as a different measure, not as a contradiction.

A higher share of elementary learners in multigrade classes is associated with lower scores: −1.2 ELLNA points and −1.3 NAT points per standard deviation. One standard deviation is a 0.31 change in the share. A fully multigrade school is therefore associated with about 3.8 ELLNA points and 4.2 NAT points less than a fully monograde school in the same division. The direction of the association holds in every region and every specification.

Internet access at the elementary level is associated with +1.0 NAT point per standard deviation, or about 2.6 points for a connected school compared with an unconnected one. It is also associated with 1.5 percentage points more Grade 1–3 readers at grade level. The ELLNA estimate is positive but imprecise.

The pupil–teacher ratio is associated with early reading: −1.4 percentage points at grade level per standard deviation. That is about four points between a school with 15 learners per teacher and one with 45. It shows no detectable association with ELLNA or NAT. The pupil–classroom ratio, the learner–toilet ratio and computers per learner are not associated with any outcome once division and school size are held constant.

Larger schools score lower on ELLNA and higher on CRLA. A higher share of Indigenous Peoples learners is associated with lower results on all three tests, most clearly on CRLA.

All of these effects are small. The largest is 0.15 standard deviations of the outcome. Which division a school belongs to explains far more, with an intraclass correlation of 0.22 to 0.25 for ELLNA and NAT. These are associations in observational data, not causes. Multigrade schools are small and remote, connected schools are urban, and the files measure neither poverty nor teacher quality.

Replacing division fixed effects with region fixed effects moves several coefficients by more than their intervals. That shows how much division-level confounding the within-division design removes. Dropping the 219 to 264 most influential schools changes no reported coefficient by more than 0.2.