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Cristina Chi - Philstar.com
May 19, 2025 | 5:03pm
MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Education will roll out its new senior high school curriculum in 841 pilot schools this upcoming school year 2025-2026, one of its top officials said on Monday, May 19.
The pilot implementation of the revised curriculum for grades 11 and 12 comes after DepEd completed gathering public feedback on the draft curriculum in April.
The new curriculum will now be tested in select schools representing less than 7% of all senior high schools in the country, Education Undersecretary Wilfredo Cabral said at a House basic education committee hearing.
The DepEd official said they identified the schools that can join the pilot implementation through a nomination process that looked at their teachers, facilities and learning resources.
Here's what you need to know about DepEd's preparations for the rollout of the strengthened senior high school curriculum:
Nomination process
According to DepEd's presentation, the Central Office Selection Committee initially received 1,277 nominations from regional offices. Only schools classified as "Highly Ready" based on final readiness scores were considered for inclusion, totaling 755 schools.
The committee then encoded and validated reports of the "highly ready" schools, removing those with multiple deficiencies such as those lacking electives, had insufficient teacher workload, among others. This process resulted in an initial list of 727 schools.
Based on feedback from the Senate basic education committee, DepEd added "moderately ready" private and rural schools to the final selection, bringing the total to 841 participating schools.
Of the pilot schools, 580 are public schools while 261 are private schools.
Only 35 schools are located in rural areas, while 806 are urban. Additionally, 78 are stand-alone senior high schools while 759 are integrated with other grade levels.
Teacher training and preparation
To prepare teachers for the new curriculum, DepEd will conduct teacher training from May 25 to June 7, just weeks before the new school year begins, Cabral said.
DepEd said it will provide lesson exemplars for teachers, along with a curated list of learning materials mapped to the competencies in the curriculum and a budget for printing.
What's new in senior high?
Reducing tracks. Students will no longer be locked into the strand or track they choose, according to DepEd. Under the new curriculum, they can choose electives from different subject clusters based on their interests and career plans, a feature DepEd calls the "doorway option."
The new curriculum also reduces the current four academic tracks—Academic, Technical-Vocational-Livelihood, Sports, and Arts & Design—to just two: Academic and Technical Professional (TechPro).
Arts and Design, as well as Sports electives, will still be offered but will be categorized under the Academic track.
Streamlined core subjects. Core subjects are being reduced from 15 to five.
DepEd said this is to ensure all subjects are aligned with the required general education subjects in college.
The core subjects in senior high school are the following:
- Effective Communication/Mabisang Komunikasyon
- Life and Career Skills
- General Mathematics
- General Science
- Pag-aaral ng Kasaysayan at Lipunang Pilipino
Cabral said the reduction of core subjects follows close talks and several meetings with the Commission on Higher Education (CHED).
"We would like to ensure that there will be no bridging subjects in CHED for this one," Cabral said.
New elective clusters. Under the Academic track, students can choose subject from five clusters: Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities; Business and Entrepreneurship; Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM); Sports, Health and Wellness; and Field Experience.
The TechPro track offers six clusters: Agriculture and Fishery Arts; Information and Communication Technology; Family and Consumer Science; Industrial Arts; Maritime; and Work Immersion.
These clusters are not the same as tracks. DepEd said a cluster of electives is essentially the set of subjects that a student can choose from when they decide what classes to take.
Monitoring and evaluation. DepEd said it will closely monitor implementation across different governance levels to keep the program on track. The department is also collaborating with the state think tank Philippine Institute for Development Studies to design and implement an evaluation study.
DepEd earlier said it plans to implement the new senior high school curriculum in phases, starting with the incoming school year.
School year 2025 to 2026 is scheduled to open on June 16.
