SENATOR WIN GATCHALIAN CNN THE SOURCE INTERVIEW ON PISA, SEA GAMES & HS FOR SPORTS

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

PISA

SEN WIN: Two important things; curriculum reform and teacher's training. Among many things, these are the top of mind reforms that we need to do.

SEN WIN: Frankly, I expected this, I've been tracking the National Achievement Test (NAT) for the last 10 years and we've been doing poorly in the last achievement tests. Elementary is hovering around 60% and then High School is hovering around less that 40%. We're not doing well in NAT therefore it will translate in the PISA exam. What I didn't expect is we would end last in reading and second to the last in Math and Science, but for me I'm an optimist, I want to look at the upside, and the upside here is were doing a lot of reforms... DepEd has recognized this problem and they are now pivoting to quality, which the legislature, we will now support the pivot to quality.

SEN WIN: We have an institution called the National Educators Academy in the Philippines (NEAP) which is a dormant institution but we will now revitalize this institution to make it a vehicle to train our teachers, to upscale to rescale our teachers. Teachers who are already in service will be given constant training so they can elevate their learnings.

SEN WIN: In 2020, we have about a 1.5 billion for NEAP but we will fund it more as the years go by but what's important now is that we have a recognition of the problem, there's now a strategy to reform certain parts of our education.

SEN WIN: Masyadong masikip ang ating curriculum, masyadong madami tinuturo sa mga bata and dahil sa dami, the absorption is now becoming an issue and time that the teachers allocate to teach is becoming an issue. So, one of the things that came out yesterday was to look into the curriculum, revitalize it and make it much more spread out rather than cramped. These are the things that needs to be reformed.

SEA GAMES INQUIRY

SEN WIN: I think my focus will be on the preparation, also how to maximize the assets we built these are world class assets that we want to maximize not only for events but for regular basis.

SEN WIN: In the beginning, there were birth pains but it's all isolated cases because if it's an organizational issue it would be systematic but after the first and second day we can see that the organizing team now managed to put the procedures in place and everything went smoothly from then on.

SEN WIN: After the event, it's important to have a post-event analysis and I really feel since we have the facilities already we can move forward to even bigger events.

HS FOR SPORTS

SEN WIN: One of the proposal that we made is to put up a high school for sports and I think with the outstanding showing this SEA Games I think it's logical to move forward with grass roots development of sports and high school for sports will be a vehicle to develop our athletes from the grassroots and also from an early age. If you want world-class athletes you have to let them experience world-class facilities. So it's just fitting to put the high school in New Clark City

SEN WIN: [Students of this high school] will be scholars, libre ito parang regular high school natin pero important feature dito is yung sports facilities.

SEN WIN: [in terms of funding] We will attract corporate sponsors, corporate sponsor is the main sponsor of the event, so corporate sponsors, we will also welcome international donors, a lot of international donors want to develop the sporting event the sporting culture but definitely the academics will come from government, government will fund the academics and the government will fund the stipend that will be given to the athletes. We are targeting January of next year, at least the rollout, the law is being discussed in the Senate, the House is also in unison with this proposal hopefully we get the bill approved by this year or early part of next year and we'll rollout in 2020.