Is the School Improvement Plan working?

• In the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), only 16 percent of Filipino 15-year-olds reached the baseline proficiency level in mathematics, against 69 percent across OECD countries. In reading the figures were 24 percent against 74 percent, and in science 23 percent against 76 percent (OECD, 2023, pp. 2–3).
• In the 2019 Southeast Asia Primary Learning Metrics, only 10 percent of Grade 5 learners reached the reading level expected at the end of primary school (DepEd, 2021, p. 2).

Policy answers to this crisis are usually national: curriculum, teacher hiring, classrooms, assessment. Yet every national program eventually lands in a particular school, with its own learners, teachers, parents, and problems. The School Improvement Plan (SIP) is where that happens on paper. In it, a school says what its learners most need, why, and what the school community will do about it over three years. Its yearly slice, the Annual Implementation Plan (AIP), says what will happen this year, who is responsible, and what it will cost.

Three developments make the SIP more important in 2026 than at any time since its rules were written.

Money now follows the plan.

In 2025 DepEd created the School Innovation and Improvement Fund (SIIF). For 2026 it allocated ₱2,289,250,000 from the national budget to the public schools that do not manage their own funds, ₱50,000 to ₱85,700 per school (the formula allows up to ₱110,000). Schools do not submit funding proposals; the main use of the fund is activities “identified in the approved SIP and specifically determined in the AIP,” focused on literacy and numeracy (RA 12314; DM 48, s. 2026). The local Special Education Fund (SEF) may pay only for items in the approved SIP and the division’s plan, and after mandatory expenses the first listed use of school MOOE is the activities in the approved SIP and AIP.

Many schools write the plan without a principal.

In October 2026 DepEd told the Senate that about half of public schools (around 23,000 of 45,928) still lacked principal items, down from 55 percent in January 2026 (EDCOM II, 2026c). DepEd and the budget department have adopted a standard of one principal item per school (DBM–DepEd JC 01, s. 2025). The budget department approved 6,000 new School Principal I positions for 2026, but the proposed 2027 budget funds none (EDCOM II, 2026c).

The rules have aged.

The SIP order dates from 2015. Since then DepEd has changed its school-based management system, performance management, curriculum, school calendar, enrollment policy, and data systems, and it has issued many orders that tell schools to put something new into the SIP.

This paper asks one question: does Philippine policy let the SIP do its job, which is to help a school head and the school community improve learning? It looks at what the law and DepEd require, what research says good school improvement planning looks like, what DepEd has added to the plan since 2015, whether schools have what the plan assumes, and what the evidence says about how SIPs are actually written and used.

What we searched

• The Governance of Basic Education Act (RA 9155) and other laws that mention the SIP.
• DepEd Order No. 44, s. 2015, its SIP Guidebook, and all 16 annexes.
• The DepEd Orders issued from 2015 to October 2026 and the DepEd Memoranda issued from 2020 to October 2026 that were available to us as searchable text (about 540 orders and 600 memoranda), searched for the phrase “school improvement plan.” We read every passage found and checked whether each issuance is still in force.
• The 39 issuances missing from those collections, from the original PDFs or DepEd’s website. We searched the 16 that have text; for the 23 scanned or unavailable ones, we read the titles and read further where a title suggested a link to the SIP.
• Targeted searches for a law, a joint circular, and two regional memoranda that the phrase search could not reach.
• The three reports of the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II, 2024a, 2025, 2026a), the studies they cite on school-based management, and EDCOM II’s news releases on principal staffing and school funds (2024–2026).
• DepEd’s Basic Education Development Plan 2030 and its Quality Basic Education Development Plan 2025–2035.
• Published research on school-based management, school leadership, and school improvement planning.

How we judged the evidence

• We use “studies find” only for meta-analyses and for studies with quasi-experimental or long-term designs.
• We use “is associated with” for correlations, and “reports” for case studies and consultations.
• We use “DepEd requires” only for issuance text.
• We say “we found no…” only after a documented search.
• Our own judgments are marked as such.

Limits

• Twenty-three orders and memoranda from the period were scans or unavailable as text. We checked them by title, and read further only where a title suggested a link to the SIP.
• We did not search memoranda issued before 2020, orders issued before 2015, or regional and division issuances, apart from the examples named.
• Most research on the quality of school plans comes from other countries.
• No national dataset on SIP quality exists. The limits are listed in full under Limitations and what we don’t know.

The legal basis

RA 9155 (2001) says there “shall be a school head for all public elementary schools and public high schools or a cluster thereof.” The school head is “both an instructional leader and administrative manager.” Among the school head’s twelve areas of “authority, accountability and responsibility,” the fourth is “developing the school education program and school improvement plan” (RA 9155, Sec. 7, E).

The law does not say how the plan should be made. DepEd sets that out in DepEd Order No. 44, s. 2015, Guidelines on the Enhanced School Improvement Planning (SIP) Process and the School Report Card (SRC), dated 29 September 2015. The order makes the enclosed SIP Guidebook “the official reference in the preparation and implementation of the SIP and SRC.” It has no end date: it “shall remain in effect, unless sooner repealed, amended, or rescinded.”

The Guidebook cites the legal basis as “RA 9155, Chapter 1, Section 7.D.4.” The SIP provision is in Section 7, part E (School Level), item 4.

A short history

2003–2005.

Schools in 23 districts covered by the World Bank-supported Third Elementary Education Project (TEEP) wrote five-year SIPs “in partnership with parents and the community using data such as student achievement,” led by the principal or head teacher, then annual plans and a report card. Principals were trained to lead the process, and the schools received their MOOE in cash rather than in kind, to be used according to the annual plan (Khattri, Ling, & Jha, 2010).

After 2006.

School-based management (SBM) spread to the rest of the country. Schools again wrote five-year SIPs, and DepEd allocated SBM grants “based on significance of their SIP/AIP” (Yamauchi, 2014).

2015.

DepEd Order No. 44, s. 2015 revised the 2009 SIP Manual, shortened the cycle to three school years, and built in the tools of DepEd’s Continuous Improvement program.

After 2015.

SBM grants appear to have stopped. The last grant order, DepEd Order No. 45, s. 2015, covered FY 2014 funds (Laguda, Aquino, Cangayao, & Tagle, 2025, p. 39).

What the 2015 process asks for

The SIP is “a roadmap that lays down specific interventions that a school, with the help of the community and other stakeholders, will undertake within a period of three consecutive school years.” Its aim is to improve the three “key result areas” of basic education: access, quality, and governance.

The point of the narrow area of focus is “to aim your improvement efforts on a particular problem rather than attempting to solve all the problems at once.” For problems in teaching and learning, the Guidebook suggests drawing the project team from the school’s Learning Action Cells, so improvement work and teacher professional learning are the same activity.

The steps themselves, with the templates, are explained in our School Improvement Plan guide and the root cause analysis guide.

What happens to it.

All planning team members sign the SIP, and the school submits it to the Schools Division Office (SDO) at the start of the cycle. In each later year the school submits its AIP, project monitoring reports, and year-end School Report Card, “no later than the second week of May.” The SDO’s School Governance and Operations Division is to monitor progress and conduct “a summative evaluation of the SIP at the end of every cycle.” At the Central Office, the School Effectiveness Division and the planning office are to “monitor the progress of SIP implementation quarterly and evaluate the effectiveness of the enhanced process annually.”

Approval.

DepEd orders have long referred to the “approved” SIP, for example in the MOOE rules (DO 13, s. 2016; DO 8, s. 2019), yet DepEd Order No. 44 itself has no approval step. The current procedure is set out in an unnumbered Central Office memorandum of 27 November 2018, which DepEd’s NCR office forwarded to its divisions in 2019: a Division Appraisal Committee scores the plan with a quality-assurance tool, and if it meets expectations the Schools Division Superintendent approves it and issues a certificate of acceptance (DepEd–NCR, 2019). The Quality Basic Education Development Plan adds that “school plans shall be appraised by the SDO” (DepEd, 2025f, p. 28).

The School Report Card (SRC).

The school reports to its community at least twice a year, at the October and March assemblies, on enrollment, dropouts, promotion, test results, literacy, ratios, and project status. The order says the SRC “is not for planning and accountability; it is a communication and advocacy tool,” and that it “shall not be used as basis for the” Performance-Based Bonus.

Who pays for it.

DepEd Order No. 44 says the costs of implementing the policy “shall be charged against local funds.”

How the SIP relates to other school plans

What school leaders do that matters

A widely cited synthesis of research on school leadership concluded that “leadership is second only to classroom instruction among all school-related factors that contribute to what students learn at school” (Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004, p. 5).

Leithwood and colleagues later revisited a related set of claims, first published in 2008, against newer and stronger evidence (Leithwood, Harris, & Hopkins, 2020). They describe leadership’s effect on the school organization, and through it on teaching and learning, as significant but moderate in size. Most of it is indirect: leaders improve learning by improving key classroom and school conditions, such as teachers’ motivation, ability, and working conditions, and by encouraging home routines that support learning. They group effective practices into four domains: setting directions; building relationships and developing people; redesigning the organization to support desired practices; and improving the instructional program.

For the SIP, this means a plan matters only if it changes those conditions: what teachers do, the time and materials they have, how they work together, and how families support learning.

The working environment matters in its own right. In a study of teachers in one large U.S. school district, teachers in schools with more supportive professional environments improved more over time. After ten years, those in schools at the 75th percentile of environment ratings had improved 38 percent more than those at the 25th percentile (Kraft & Papay, 2014).

What is known about school-based management

SBM gives schools more say over decisions and money, and in many countries it includes some form of school improvement plan. A World Bank review of the international evidence offers three cautions (Bruns, Filmer, & Patrinos, 2011):

Rigorous evidence is scarce.

“Only a very few rigorous studies of the impact of SBM exist” (p. 122).

It takes time.

In the United States, SBM reforms needed “about five years before any fundamental changes occur at the school level,” and about eight years before changes appeared in test scores (p. 129).

Capacity has to be built.

SBM projects should “include a component to build the managerial capacity of parents, teachers, and other key players” (p. 129).

The Philippines has two rigorous studies of its own, both of SBM in the 2000s, when SIPs came with training and more control over money. In the 23 TEEP districts, SBM had “a statistically significant, albeit small, overall positive effect on average school-level test scores” (Khattri, Ling, & Jha, 2010). In divisions that adopted SBM after 2006, SBM raised the average National Achievement Test score by 4.2 points over three years, with a larger gain in mathematics (Yamauchi, 2014). In both, the plan was one part of a package, so the studies cannot tell whether the plan, the training, or the money made the difference. They do show that the Philippine version of SBM, when plans came with resources, was associated with modest gains.

What is known about school plans themselves

Research on the plans themselves is thinner and comes mostly from the United States, where many districts require schools to write improvement plans. One study asked whether the quality of school plans is related to school performance (Fernandez, 2011). Another rated the plans submitted in a Los Angeles improvement initiative and asked whether plan quality was related to implementation (Strunk, Marsh, Bush-Mecenas, & Duque, 2016). A third examined how principals of low-performing schools wrote plans that were “good enough” to satisfy a mandate (Meyers & VanGronigen, 2019). We had access only to summaries of these studies, so we do not report their findings here. The questions they ask are the right ones for the Philippines: does a better plan lead to a better school, and when does planning become a ritual?

The Guidebook’s authors anticipated the second question. They told schools “not to rush to the solutions. As they say, the planning is just as important as the plan.”

How the 2015 design compares with the evidence

We found 87 documents that mention the SIP: 66 DepEd Orders and 17 DepEd Memoranda from the collections described under How this review was done, plus one law, one joint circular, and two regional memoranda from targeted searches. Of these, 35 are in force and either require something to be written into the SIP or AIP, or tie money, staff, or eligibility to the plan. Several issuances repeat the same requirement; counting each requirement once, they make 22 distinct requirements, 6 of them first issued in 2025.

Other issuances ask schools to align activities with the SIP, or use SIP inclusion as a monitoring indicator, for example Brigada Eskwela (DM 27, s. 2026) and preventive drug education (DO 30, s. 2018). They are not counted above.

Each requirement makes sense on its own: programs that live in the SIP get planned, budgeted, and monitored. But no issuance brings them together. A school head who wants to know everything the SIP must contain has to find dozens of orders and memoranda issued over eleven years.

What the list does to the plan

Our judgment, based on the documents above: the accumulation pulls the SIP away from its own design. The Guidebook asks schools to choose a few priorities and focus deeply on each. A plan that must also show disaster preparedness, WASH, gender, inclusion, dental health, ARAL, language strategy, sports, and more risks becoming a list of compliance entries, whatever the school’s own priorities are.

The School Innovation and Improvement Fund shows how national priorities enter the plan. The first memorandum is dated 29 August 2025. Allocations were set by enrollment, not by plan content. It asked each recipient school’s planning team, with its governance council, to “revisit and review the SIP and AIP” in the first week of September 2025, and to ensure “that literacy and numeracy are identified as PIAs”; schools then had September to December to implement (DM 73, s. 2025). The 2026 memorandum asks schools to “revisit their current AIP and, when necessary, identify PIAs to enhance literacy and numeracy” (DM 48, s. 2026).

Literacy and numeracy are the right priorities for most Filipino schools. But here the priority was set nationally, with one week to review the plan: the reverse of the slow, bottom-up process DepEd Order No. 44 describes.

What has aged in the 2015 Guidebook

A school head

Policy.

RA 9155 provides for a school head in every public school or cluster of schools, and DepEd Order No. 44 makes the school head the leader of the planning team. A 2025 joint circular of the budget department and DepEd sets a standard of one School Principal item per school (DBM–DepEd JC 01, s. 2025, §9.1), with no timetable.

Coverage.

At a Senate hearing on 16 October 2026, DepEd reported that about 22,000 of 45,928 public schools had principals, and about 23,000, about half, had no principal item. EDCOM II’s release calls this “around 45%”, but its counts come to about half. In January 2026 the share was 55 percent (26,453 of 48,113 schools). EDCOM II counts 13,313 schools with neither a principal nor a head teacher (EDCOM II, 2026c). EDCOM II’s final report, using earlier data, put the share at 48 percent (EDCOM II, 2026a, p. 390).

New items.

The budget department approved 6,000 new School Principal I positions for 2026; by October about 2,000 had been filled, and 914 teachers-in-charge had been reclassified into principal items. DepEd asked for ₱10.5 billion to create more than 14,000 principal items in 2027, but the proposed 2027 budget funds none; DepEd said it would rely on reclassifications under the expanded career progression system instead (EDCOM II, 2026c). EDCOM II’s roadmap had recommended 6,000, 8,000, and 8,124 new items in 2026, 2027, and 2028 (EDCOM II, 2026a, p. 495).

Competencies.

For the share of principals meeting SBM competencies, the same roadmap records a baseline of 0 percent, “pending the establishment of DepEd’s Principals Academy” (EDCOM II, 2026a, p. 495).

The 2000s lesson.

When the SIP was first introduced, principals and head teachers were trained to lead it (Khattri et al., 2010). The project’s completion report also warned that community engagement demanded “considerable time” from principals and teachers, which “several were beginning to find burdensome.”

Gap.

In about half of all schools, the person responsible for the SIP holds no principal position or pay, and often has had no preparation for the role. Policy assumes a principal; practice often provides a teacher-in-charge. See the principal shortage in numbers.

Money that follows the plan

School MOOE.

DepEd Order No. 8, s. 2019 lists the uses of school MOOE “among others, subject to availability of funds and prioritization of mandatory expense items.” The first is “to fund activities as identified in the approved School Improvement Plan (SIP) for implementation in the current year and as specifically determined in the Annual Implementation Plan (AIP).” Others include ceremonies, supplies, minor repairs, and small equipment.

The SIIF.

Its main category is “SIP-AIP Activities”: activities “identified in the approved SIP and specifically determined in the AIP,” provided they focus on literacy and numeracy. It may also fund action research projects and, from any remaining balance, related operating expenses (DM 48, s. 2026, Encl. V.3).

The local Special Education Fund.

The Local School Board prepares school budgets “based on the DepEd-approved SIP and DEDP,” and all SEF expenditure items must be among those allowed and “contained in the approved SIP and DEDP” (Joint Circular No. 1, s. 2025, §6.3, §6.3.1). The school head gives an annual progress report on the SIP (§6.4.2).

Utility bills.

In EDCOM II’s 2023 consultations, school heads from Iloilo and Davao reported that “30% to 70% of their school MOOE budget is spent to cover utility bills” (EDCOM II, 2024a, pp. xxxv, 297).

Little left over.

A 2025 study for EDCOM II reports that one consultation participant had “only P20,000 … left to fund the projects under their SIP” after operating expenses, and concludes that MOOE is, “by design, not a source of funding for innovation” (Laguda et al., 2025, p. 39).

Per-learner MOOE.

Between 2018 and 2022, per-learner MOOE was ₱1,041 for elementary, ₱1,434 for junior high, and ₱1,436 for senior high learners (EDCOM II, 2026a, p. 363).

The new formula.

A “normative” formula replaced the 2013 formula in part for FY 2025 and in full for the FY 2026 budget. In EDCOM II’s example, a medium-sized elementary school’s MOOE rises from ₱467,000 in FY 2024 to ₱904,000 in FY 2026, an increase of 94 percent (EDCOM II, 2026a, p. 363); EDCOM II had estimated that the full formula would raise the overall school MOOE budget by about 85 percent (EDCOM II, 2024b). We found no public DepEd order or numbered memorandum that sets out the new formula, and the rule linking MOOE to the SIP is still DO 8, s. 2019.

Few schools control their own funds.

Only 5.9 percent of public schools are Implementing Units with direct access to their budgets. The other 94.1 percent must process all MOOE through their division offices, which EDCOM II says turns “what should be discretionary school-level spending into a centralized administrative bottleneck” (EDCOM II, 2026b).

Two clocks.

DO 8, s. 2019 requires the AIP to “follow the calendar year format,” while the school year runs from June to April, and the SIIF must be used within the fiscal year. In 2025, SIIF schools reviewed their plans in September and implemented by December.

Gap.

School money is tied to the plan, but the money a school could actually shape was small, largely committed to fixed costs, and on a fiscal calendar different from the school year. The FY 2026 MOOE increase may change this; its effect on what schools can fund from their plans is not yet documented. Our judgment: the funding picture explains much of the compliance that observers describe. When a plan cannot fund its own priorities, writing it well has little payoff.

Time

Policy.

DepEd has moved to protect teachers’ time: it ordered the removal of administrative tasks from teachers (DO 2, s. 2024), set limits on their workload (DO 5, s. 2024), and narrowed the forms teachers must fill in, a cut from 174 to 75 by EDCOM II’s count (EDCOM II, 2026a, p. 283; DO 6, s. 2025). The SIP, the AIP, and the School Report Card were on the old list of teacher forms and are not on the new one. Teachers who serve on the planning team or governance council may still be asked for related reports, but “as may be practicable, other members aside from teachers shall assume primary responsibility for these forms and reports,” and school heads must ensure teachers’ workload is not “adversely affected” (DO 6, s. 2025, para. 5).

The calendar.

DepEd Order No. 44’s timetable was written for a June-to-March school year: preparation and assessment from January to March, planning in April and May, submission to the division by the second week of May, and implementation from June. The three-term calendar (DO 9, s. 2026) runs SY 2026–2027 from 8 June 2026 to 8 April 2027, followed by teachers’ 30-day end-of-year break from 9 April to 9 May 2027. The SIP’s planning phase now falls largely inside that break, and the submission date in the week after it, when the end-of-year intervention program and teacher training begin. We found no SIP or School Report Card activity in the new calendar.

Gap.

Policy has rightly taken planning paperwork off teachers, but it has not said who does the work instead, other than “other members” of the planning team where practicable, or when. The SIP’s calendar no longer fits the school year.

Usable data

Policy.

The Guidebook’s School-Community Data Template (Annex 1A) gathers school and community data in one place. DepEd’s assessment policy says school plans “should always be based on insights gained from studying data” (DO 29, s. 2017). The three-term calendar sets beginning- and end-of-year testing windows for reading and numeracy assessments (DO 9, s. 2026). The 2025 SIIF memorandum told schools to review their priorities “based on their School Improvement Plan and Annual Implementation Plan and existing learner assessment data” (DM 73, s. 2025). School data collected through the Basic Education Information System are to be published on DepEd’s Paaralang Bukas dashboard (DM 28, s. 2026).

Implementation.

A 2017 case study reports that SIP project teams often lacked “the time, resources, or capacity to undertake all steps, resulting in a continuation of previous practices of simply copying and submitting information found on templates rather than deeply engaging with data analysis” (Read & Atinc, 2017, p. 17). EDCOM II recommends “incorporating diagnostic results into school improvement planning” so that assessments shift “from compliance-oriented activities toward meaningful instruments” (EDCOM II, 2026a, p. 147).

Gap.

Schools have more learner data than in 2015, and the end-of-year assessment window falls during the SIP’s assessment phase. But no standing rule ties those results to the SIP cycle; the 2025 SIIF memorandum did so once. The capacity to analyse the data is uneven.

Support and quality assurance

Policy.

DepEd Order No. 44 makes district supervisors, with trained principals and teachers, “coaches to guide the schools in crafting and implementing the SIPs.” The revised SBM system makes the division responsible for technical assistance through a field technical assistance team (DO 7, s. 2024). The 2018 appraisal procedure has division committees score each SIP with a quality-assurance tool; its guidance says the committee’s “major consideration is to look on the important parts rather than focus on the technical aspects, e.g. grammar, coherence” (DepEd–NCR, 2019).

Implementation.

EDCOM II proposes a “school head tool kit and resource center … to streamline administrative processes and allow school leaders to focus more on teaching and leading” (EDCOM II, 2025, p. 264). The World Bank review lists capacity-building as a condition for SBM to work (Bruns et al., 2011, p. 129). We found no published assessment of how much SIP coaching divisions actually provide.

Gap.

Support is assigned on paper, but no one reports on its reach or quality.

Feedback and accountability

Policy.

DepEd Order No. 44 requires a summative SIP evaluation by the division after every cycle, and quarterly monitoring and an annual evaluation of the process by the Central Office. It says the School Report Card is “not for planning and accountability,” and it allows SIP work to count: the participation of the school head, teachers, and staff in the SIP “may be included in the Results-Based Performance Management System,” including the school head’s office performance form (DO 44, s. 2015, para. 6). Teachers’ development plans must align with the SIP (DM 89, s. 2025).

School heads’ performance management.

It is in transition. In March 2024 DepEd issued interim guidelines for a revised Office Performance Commitment and Review Form, to be used by “heads of schools in the elementary and secondary levels” and meant to reflect “their respective education development plans in the Region, Divisions, and schools” (DM-OUHROD-2024-0586). In July 2024 DepEd suspended its results-based performance system for all school-based personnel, “school heads, teachers, and nonteaching personnel” (DM-OSEC-2024-01), and in February 2025 lifted the suspension for teachers (DM 17, s. 2025). We did not find a national memorandum expressly lifting it for school heads, although division memoranda show the office form in use for SY 2025–2026. By November 2025 DepEd had draft tools for a separate performance system for school heads based on the PPSSH, and called a drafting workshop (DM-OUHROD-2025-3315).

Implementation.

We found no published Central Office evaluation of the enhanced SIP process since 2016, no published division summative evaluations, and no study answering the question BEDP 2030 itself posed: “Do School Improvement Plans have any impact on learning outcomes?” A 2017 case study reports that “the different planning (E-SIP), advocacy (SRC), and accountability (RPMS) tools also remain purposely disconnected” (Read & Atinc, 2017, p. 17).

Gap.

No one learns systematically from the SIPs that tens of thousands of public schools write. DepEd Order No. 44 allows, but does not require, SIP work in the school head’s performance commitments, and the school head’s own performance system is still being designed.

Parents hardly know the plans exist.

In the same survey, “fewer than half of all parents interviewed were aware that their school had an improvement plan.” Most of those who knew appear to have been invited to help prepare it; “any awareness beyond this group of parents was rare” (World Bank, 2016a, p. 76).

Some principals named planning as a weakness.

The main weaknesses principals identified concerned school autonomy, and about 20 percent of elementary and high school principals “also cited weaknesses in school improvement planning” (World Bank, 2016a, p. 72).

Plans focused on facilities.

DepEd’s BEDP 2030 states that community participation “increased the community’s ownership of the plan.” However, “most School Improvement Plans (SIP) unevenly focused on improving school facilities rather than directly addressing issues on teaching and learning” (DepEd, 2022a).

Templates were copied.

A 2017 case study reports schools “simply copying and submitting information found on templates rather than deeply engaging with data analysis” (Read & Atinc, 2017, p. 17).

Plans are described as written for compliance.

This is one strand of evidence, restated several times. Participants in EDCOM II’s 2023 consultations said that, because school budgets for improvement are limited, “most schools craft school improvement plans out of lip service rather than undertake a participatory bottom-up approach” (EDCOM II, 2024a, p. 303). A 2025 study for EDCOM II restates this, “most schools craft their SIPs out of compliance,” citing EDCOM’s 2023 synthesis, and adds that SIPs and report cards are “sometimes perceived as administrative burdens rather than effective means of engaging stakeholders” (Laguda et al., 2025, pp. 39–40). EDCOM II’s second and final reports summarise that study’s conclusion that school-based management has become “compliance-oriented” (EDCOM II, 2025, p. 371; 2026a, p. 369).

DepEd has said something similar about SBM.

When it revised the SBM system in 2024, DepEd acknowledged that practitioners found it “laden with voluminous and repetitive documentary requirements,” and it dropped the requirement to attach supporting documents (DO 7, s. 2024).

How strong is this evidence? Weaker than the number of citations suggests. The only national survey dates from 2014, before the current process began. The later evidence is a 2017 case study, a statement in a 2022 plan, and EDCOM II’s 2023 consultations, which later reports restate. None measured SIP quality across a representative sample of schools, and none tested whether better plans go with better learning. We found no published national evaluation of SIP implementation since 2016.

The direction of the evidence is consistent; its depth is not. That is itself a finding. DepEd requires an annual evaluation of the SIP process (DO 44, s. 2015), and BEDP 2030 lists the impact of SIPs as an open research question, yet the answer is not public.

For the DepEd Central Office

R1. Issue the revised SIP policy that BEDP 2030 promised (G1, G2, G5, G6, G8).

DepEd Order No. 44 is a DepEd issuance, so DepEd can revise it without new law.

• Consolidate: add one maintained annex listing everything other issuances require in the SIP or AIP, marked mandatory or optional, and have any new issuance amend that annex rather than add a separate requirement. DepEd already applies this principle elsewhere: its 2026 El Niño guidelines tell offices and schools to “use existing plans, assessment tools, referral pathways, and reporting systems wherever practicable; do not create parallel plans or reports when existing mechanisms can serve the purpose” (DM 64, s. 2026).
• Separate compliance from priorities: let schools record mandated programs in a short standard section, and reserve the priority improvement areas for the few problems the school’s own data and learners point to.
• Fit the calendar: align the SIP and AIP timetable with the three-term school year (DO 9, s. 2026), and reconcile the school year with the calendar-year AIP and fiscal-year grants.
• Update the references: the School Governance Council, the DO 7, s. 2024 self-assessment, LIS and BEIS, current assessments, and current performance management.
• Put approval and quality assurance in the order itself, which now rest on an unnumbered 2018 memorandum and a general clause in the Q-BEDP: who appraises, against what criteria, and within what time.
• Say who does the work: DO 6, s. 2025 moved planning paperwork off teachers where practicable; the order should say which personnel carry it.
• Offer a lighter version for small schools and schools led by teachers-in-charge.

R2. Publish what DepEd Order No. 44 already requires, and answer BEDP’s question (G8).

Release the annual evaluations of the SIP process and the division summative evaluations, or carry them out if they were never done. Use data DepEd already collects, including the SIIF quarterly reports and year-end implementation assessments (DM 48, s. 2026) and the new MOOE allocations, to study what schools plan, what they spend on, and how learning changes, and publish the results. This is the cheapest way to learn whether the plan works.

For DepEd, the budget department, and Congress

R3. Make plan-linked school funding predictable (G4).

The SIIF was a line item in the 2026 budget (₱2,289,250,000). Keep it from year to year so schools can plan around it; consider letting unspent amounts follow the three-year SIP rather than the fiscal year; and let schools set their literacy and numeracy priorities from their own assessment data instead of reviewing plans to a national deadline. The Philippine evidence associates SBM with modest learning gains when plans came with resources (Khattri et al., 2010; Yamauchi, 2014), and a 2025 study for EDCOM II recommends reviving SBM grants (Laguda et al., 2025). We do not estimate costs beyond the existing appropriation.

R4. Fund and prepare school head positions with the SIP in mind (G3).

One principal item per school is already the standard (DBM–DepEd JC 01, s. 2025), and 6,000 items were funded for 2026, but the proposed 2027 budget funds no new items. Keep funding them until every school has one, and prepare the people: training under NEAP, including the planned Principals Academy, should cover SIP leadership, and teachers-in-charge who lead SIPs now should not have to wait for an item to get it.

For Schools Division Offices

R5. Coach for quality, not format (G7, G8).

When appraising SIPs, look at whether priorities come from the school’s data and learners, whether the root causes are plausible, and whether the AIP funds the priorities; grammar and template layout matter less, as the 2018 appraisal guidance already says. Give schools a current checklist of mandated SIP content until the national revision, and adjust local SIP timetables to the three-term calendar.

For school heads and teachers-in-charge, this school year

R6. Plan for depth inside the current rules.

These are within your authority now.

• Keep two lists: record mandated programs in one short section, choose no more than a few genuine priority improvement areas from your own data, and give them most of your discretionary money.
• Use the evidence you already have: base next year’s AIP on the end-of-year reading and numeracy results that arrive in March, and on what learners and parents tell you.
• Plan with your teachers’ learning time: draw project teams for teaching problems from your Learning Action Cells, as the Guidebook suggests, and keep the paperwork with other planning-team members where practicable, as DO 6, s. 2025 directs.
• Test before you scale: try a solution in one section or grade, compare the data before and after, then decide.
• Tell parents: use the School Report Card to show parents what the plan is and how it is going, in the language they use. In 2014, fewer than half of parents knew their school had a plan.
• Spend SIIF on your SIP priority: if your school receives the fund, put it on the literacy or numeracy problem your plan identified, not on what is easiest to liquidate.

For aspiring school heads

R7. Prepare for the plan, not just the test.

The PPSSH strands on school planning (1.2), learner voice (1.6), and monitoring and evaluation (1.7) describe what the SIP asks of a school head. Build four skills: reading and explaining school data; leading a root cause analysis with teachers; facilitating a planning team that includes learners, parents, and the barangay; and reading a school budget (MOOE, SEF, SIIF) against its plan. Volunteer for your school’s planning team now: most school heads learn the SIP by doing it.

R6 and R7 are within your authority today; R1 to R5 are for DepEd, the budget department, and Congress, so raise them with your division, your Local School Board, and your professional networks. For the school head’s other duties, read the roles of a school head, and for the path to a principal item, the guide for aspiring school heads.

No fieldwork.

We did not interview school heads or rate actual SIPs. Our account of practice relies on others’ surveys, consultations, and case studies, which overlap, and the one national survey predates the current process.

No national data on SIP quality.

No public dataset records what SIPs contain, how good they are, or whether they are carried out. We therefore make no claim about the effect of SIPs on learning.

Search limits.

The inventory covers the DepEd Orders (2015 onward) and Memoranda (2020 onward) available to us as searchable text, plus 39 issuances missing from those collections, found as original PDFs or on DepEd’s website; it was a phrase search. Twenty-three of those 39 were scans or unavailable as text, which we checked by title and, where relevant, by reading the pages. Orders issued before 2015 that may still apply (such as the child protection policy, DO 40, s. 2012), memoranda before 2020, and regional and division issuances were outside the search, apart from the examples named. The counts describe the documents we could search; they are not a census.

Regional variation.

One region defines its 2023–2028 SIPs as six-year plans (DepEd Region VIII, 2023), so practice varies.

Foreign research.

Most research on the quality of school plans comes from the United States, and we could read only summaries of the key studies. We used them to frame questions, not to predict Philippine results.

Transitional policy.

Principal staffing, performance management for school heads, the MOOE formula, and the national development plan were all changing at the time of writing. We describe them as of 29 October 2026.

In-text citation: (Llego, 2026).

To cite DepEd orders and memoranda themselves, see How to Cite DepEd Orders in APA 7 and Write the Abstract.