A SURVEY revealing that 28 out of every 100 individuals aged 10 to 64 in Central Visayas struggle with reading comprehension carries significant economic implications for the region’s employment landscape as 21st-century jobs increasingly demand higher levels of critical thinking, according to an economic specialist.
This concerning statistic is from the 2024 Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey (Flemms).
Flemms report showed that for the 10 to 64 age group, the basic literacy rate is 95.7 percent, while the functional literacy rate stands at 67.6 percent, revealing a gap of 28.1 percentage points. This implies that for every 100 Filipinos in this age range in the region who can read, write and compute, 28 individuals experience comprehension difficulty.
Addressing the gap between basic and functional literacy is important as the economy shifts toward higher-order services that require critical and analytical thinking, according to Neil Andrew Menjares, chief economic specialist at the Department of Economy, Planning and Development.
The Flemms survey was unveiled by Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) 7 Officer-in-Charge Wilma Perante during a regional data dissemination forum at a Cebu City hotel on Thursday, May 29, 2025.
Flemms is a national survey designated for statistical activities critical for policy and decision-making by the government, per Executive Order 352. The report gathers information on basic and functional literacy rates.
Perante said that addressing this issue will be a challenge and efforts must concentrate on improving comprehension skills.
Menjares called on the government to prioritize targeted training programs and align education with industry needs to ensure the workforce possesses functional literacy.
“The government should address the gap between basic and functional literacy, and we need to specify which training programs to prioritize based on the skills gap between what our educational institutions are producing and what the industry actually needs,” he said in a mix of Cebuano and English.
DepEd 7’s initiatives
For its part, the Department of Education (DepEd) 7 is setting its eyes on enhancing the K-10 curriculum and boosting teacher capacity-building programs to address significant gaps between basic and functional literacy in Central Visayas.
DepEd 7 Project Development officer Adolf Aguilar emphasized that while the findings are not a cause for alarm, they demand focused interventions.
“It is not a cause of alarm, but it is a call for action on the side of the department to really focus to look into the data and think of possible interventions,” he said.
The education sector is prioritizing literacy and reading comprehension as strategic goals. Beyond curriculum enhancements and teacher training, schools are also urged to adopt their own school-based strategies for students with lower literacy levels, alongside targeted interventions in English literacy and comprehension.
Aguilar also noted that 21st-century skills and critical thinking are already integrated into the curriculum through media and information literacy classes in both English and Filipino at the senior high school level.
Extracurricular activities such as student government, sports and school press conferences further help foster critical thinking among learners, he added.
The 2024 Flemms report also recorded a basic literacy rate of 92.2 percent in Central Visayas among individuals aged five and above. This means that 92 out of every 100 Filipinos in this age group in the region are basically literate.
Among the three highly urbanized cities, Mandaue City ranked highest with 95.2 percent in basic literacy for this age group, followed by Cebu City at 94.7 percent and Lapu-Lapu City at 93.3 percent.
Central Visayas’ basic literacy rate is also higher among females at 92.7 percent, compared to 91.6 percent among males.
Basic literacy is defined as the ability of a person to read and write a simple message. Functional literacy, meanwhile, is defined as the ability of a person to read, write, compute and comprehend.
The region has a functional literacy rate of 67.6 percent for the 10 to 64 years old demographic based on the 2024 data. / DPC