Recent Trends in Out-of-School Children in the Philippines

In 2008, about 12 percent of five- to fifteen-year-old children were not in school, five years later this had gone down to about 5 percent. Adjusted net primary school attendance rates have increased from 90.8 percent in 2008 to 96.45 percent in 2013. In this paper, we examine this decline in the proportion of out-of-school children and improved primary school participation in the country and attribute them to three key government interventions. First is the passage and full implementation of mandatory kindergarten and the K-12 Law, which aims to enhance basic education through key reforms in the curricula and addition of kindergarten and two years to basic education.