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Functional literacy: Sen. Win Gatchalian underscores the importance of conducting a survey on functional literacy rates and educational skills on Wednesday, April 30, 2025. Gatchalian, chairperson of the Committee on Basic Education, said the Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS), which is conducted every five years, is very important because the survey provides data to government officials and other stakeholders to address illiteracy in the country. “This is a very important survey because now we can come up with intervention programs, especially when the budget season comes in, we can allocate budget to areas that need it the most in addressing illiteracy in their own localities,” Gatchalian said during a public hearing on the initial results of the 2024 FLEMMS. The survey, conducted by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), aims to measure the state of literacy in the country that will serve as basis in formulating policies and programs on the improvement of literacy and education status of the population. PSA informed Gatchalian that they had redefined basic literacy in the previous surveys from those who can read and write to functional literacy to those who could read, write, compute and comprehend. Gatchalian said initial results of the 2024 FLEMMS showed there are around 5.8 million Filipinos who who cannot read, write or compute while 28.4 million Filipinos have problems in understanding and comprehending. “In the old definition, there were about 79.135 million constituents considered functional literate but in the new definition, the number of functional literate went down to 60.170 million constituents or a difference of 18.965 million constituents. In other words, there were high school graduates and junior high school graduates who graduated from our system but are not functional literate. That is the problem of basic education. No one should graduate in our basic education system that should not be functional literate (cannot compute and comprehend). We need to address this,” Gatchalian stressed. (Senate Public Relations and Information Bureau)