Angara sets expectations: Not all 24,000 classrooms will be built in 2026

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January 6, 2026 | 1:26pm

MANILA, Philippines — Education Secretary Sonny Angara tempered expectations on Tuesday, January 6, over the government's classroom construction target for 2026, saying not all 24,964 classrooms with allocations in the national budget will be completed within the year.

"We don't expect all of those 24,000 to be constructed in 365 days," Angara told reporters at a Malacañang press briefing. "Historically, that doesn't really happen. But at the very least, construction will begin."

Angara explained that classroom projects typically take two to three years to finish because budget releases come late in the fiscal year, sometimes in June or October. This forces work to carry over to succeeding years.

This year, DepEd is getting a whopping P1.015 trillion budget. It said in a statement Monday that P65 billion will go toward the creation of 24,964 new classrooms. Another P7.7 billion will be for the repair and rehabilitation of existing school buildings.

Perennial delays in classroom construction have made budget carryovers a regular feature of DepEd’s infrastructure program. Official data show that while thousands of classrooms are reported as completed annually, the majority in recent years were funded using allocations from previous budgets rather than the current year’s appropriations.

The clarification comes a day after President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. signed the P6.793-trillion national budget for 2026, which allocates P65 billion for new classrooms — the largest sum since 2020.

Dividing the workload

Under the new setup this year, Angara said the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) will handle at most 25% of the target, or roughly 6,000 classrooms. 

But DPWH Secretary Vince Dizon has told DepEd he wants to be conservative, eyeing just 2,000 classrooms instead, the DepEd secretary explained. 

"We still have to settle with Secretary Vince and DPWH how many of the 24,000 they can actually construct," Angara said.

Local government units, meanwhile, are eager to take on the bulk of construction. Angara said 80 provinces, 160 cities, and a number of the country's 1,600 municipalities could potentially build classrooms if they have the capacity and if the Department of Budget and Management releases funds quickly.

"LGUs really want to take this on. They want as much of the construction downloaded to them," he said.

The 2026 budget also allows, for the first time in years, for civil society organizations and non-governmental groups with proven construction records to build new classrooms.  

Previously, only the DPWH was allowed to handle school building projects, a rule set in place by a provision in the 2018 budget. Angara last year asked Congress to remove this rule to allow for more flexibility in constructing new classrooms.

Growing pains expected

Angara acknowledged the shift to a decentralized approach will come with challenges, particularly since local governments have never been tasked with this scale of classroom construction before.

"There will be growing pains because this is the first time we're doing this," he said. "We'll have to gauge capacity. We don't have the capacity of every province memorized, so there might be overestimates, right? We expect some bumps along the road."

"This will definitely be way more efficient than the old system," he said.

The government faces a backlog of some 148,000 classrooms nationwide. Data shared in Senate hearings in 2024 show over 5.1 million public school students are classified as "aisle learners" — those in excess of the ideal classroom size of 25 to 45 students.