MANILA — Filipino learners showed improvements in reading proficiency during School Year 2025–2026, but nearly half still failed to meet grade-level expectations by the end of the school year in March 2026, according to the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM 2).

The findings were based on three literacy assessments conducted by the Department of Education (DepEd) covering learners from Grades 1 to 11.

For Grades 1 to 3, DepEd used the Comprehensive Rapid Literacy Assessment (CRLA), which classifies learners from Low Emerging to Grade Level Ready.

Meanwhile, learners in Grades 4 to 10 were assessed through the Philippine Informal Reading Inventory (Phil-IRI), which measures how many grade levels learners are behind at the beginning of the school year and classifies them by the end of the year as Frustration, Instructional, or Independent readers.

DepEd also piloted the Senior High School Literacy and Numeracy Assessment (SHS-LNA) for Grade 11 students in March 2026. The assessment covered around 1.4 million of the country’s 1.9 million senior high school learners from both public and private schools.

Based on DepEd data analyzed by EDCOM 2, around 40% of learners from Grades 1 to 10 were considered struggling readers at the beginning of the school year.

By the end of the school year, the proportion of learners classified as Grade Level Ready or Independent readers increased from 19% in June 2025 to 48% in March 2026, reflecting a 29-percentage point improvement.

Despite the gains, EDCOM 2 said one out of every two learners remained below grade-level reading proficiency by the end of the school year.

The commission also reported that around 18% or 3 million out of 16.5 million learners nationwide remained at non-proficient reading levels after the first full year of implementing the Academic Recovery and Accessible Learning (ARAL) Program.

EDCOM 2 also identified regional disparities in reading performance, noting that learners in Region II, Region VII, and Region IV-B posted nearly twice the number of struggling readers compared to learners in the Cordillera Administrative Region, Region III, and the National Capital Region.

The commission said literacy challenges were more evident in higher grade levels, particularly in Grades 7 to 10, where improvements seen in earlier grades appeared to decline as academic demands increased.

The situation was described as most severe in senior high school, where results from the pilot SHS-LNA showed that 87% of Grade 11 students were not Independent readers.

Only 12.58% of Grade 11 learners demonstrated the ability to read and understand texts independently, including identifying explicit details, making inferences, drawing conclusions, summarizing information, and engaging with academic texts expected at the senior high school level.

Most Grade 11 learners were classified under the Frustration level at 58.9%, while 28.5% were categorized under the Instructional level, meaning they still required teacher support to understand reading materials.

“We commend DepEd for undertaking a comprehensive literacy assessment, even going the extra mile to examine how our students are doing in Senior High School,” said EDCOM 2 Executive Director Karol Mark Yee.

“This baseline data provides a clear starting point on the refinement of interventions as DepEd conducts the ARAL Summer Program, and prepares for the second year of the full rollout of ARAL interventions,” he added.

Yee also said the initial implementation of the ARAL Program has already shown progress in helping learners improve their reading skills.

“We see that in the first full year of ARAL alone, significant progress has been made already in supporting our students, following the hard work of the agency and our teachers,” Yee said.

“Moving forward, our task now is to design specialized supports to our students in high school, and to better differentiate interventions to help our students actually reach ‘grade level readiness’,” he added.