Teach for the Philippines

We deliver rigorously measured literacy and life skills programs to parents and students in low resource communities in the Philippines.

Even before COVID-19, many children in the Philippines were unable to benefit from quality education. The Philippines placed last out of 79 countries in the 2018 PISA survey, cementing the fact that the country was in the midst of an urgent learning crisis and many of our students are unable to functionally read, write or do arithmetic. The pandemic then necessitated school closures, compounding not just the education problem but also amplifying the digital and technological divide that exists between the rich and the poor.

With an education system struggling to serve more than 27M learners and 1M teachers, Filipino children stand to lose more unless responsive solutions can be crafted and implemented.  

Teach for the Philippines (TFP) augments the efforts of the Department of Education (DepEd) in preventing learning loss amidst a changed landscape. TFP deploys highly-skilled and highly-effective teachers to underserved communities to roll out rigorously measured functional literacy and life skills programs through a variety of offline and online modes. Training and content knowledge for the teachers are supported through the use of an online learner management system. 

Our programs target parents with intensive three-week capacity-building sessions designed to equip them to support their children’s learning at home. After parent training, 35-session student programs are rolled out with teachers closely monitoring progress data for evaluating outcomes. Our process evaluation conducted by IDInsight, a third-party research organization, showed that the programs and approach of TFP were largely contributory to improving parents’ and students’ academic and life skills.   

The country has always faced a longstanding learning crisis, with the 2019 SEA-PLM results revealing that the majority of 5th grade Filipino learners had a reading proficiency level equivalent to that in the first years of primary school, with only a modest percentage of these learners achieving mathematics proficiency at the end of primary school. 

Closure of schools at the onset of the pandemic has significantly entrenched this problem. The distance learning setup has further emphasized the digital divide in the country with 57% of Filipino households having no access to the internet. A UNICEF study points out that school closures were especially damaging for vulnerable children, already facing the challenges of poverty and inequality. 

The pedagogical challenges in remote learning are also associated with both teachers’ and learners’ lack of digital literacy and access, highlighting the need to capacitate teachers for the new learning and teaching environment. 

In the remote learning set up, parents also carry the responsibility of ensuring that their children receive education by acting as facilitators in the absence of physical classes. However, with the economy in recession and a high unemployment rate in the country, many households scramble for resources to provide learning equipment for their children, with the majority of parents saying their children are not learning in the current set up. 

Teachers, parents and students need contextualized programs that are responsive to their needs and provide necessary support and resources to continue learning in the new normal. 

This solution primarily serves parents and students of Philippine public schools in low resource communities. If successfully implemented and scaled, this could benefit them by providing critical support for parents to support the development of foundational literacy and socio-emotional skills and for high-need students to not get left behind even in a year or years where schools are unable to open. 

By extension, this solution also benefits low resource public school communities across the Philippines by augmenting already-stretched manpower and technological resources. Our teachers do not just enter their placement schools armed with pedagogical skills and content knowledge but also with capacity-building methods for co-teachers, especially around digital literacy, household partner support, and psychosocial support. 

TFP also provides support for some hard technological needs such as the procurement of tablets and wifi devices for its placement schools and students, and physical printers, inks, and toners for the large scale printing of self-study modules. All these resources are left with the schools even at the end of the program for continued use and optimization. 

The results from 2018 and 2019 PISA, TIMMS, and SEA-PLM conclusively show what TFP unfortunately already knew: that the great majority of Filipino public school students are barely literate and barely numerate. While the learning crisis has been further deepened by school closures, the challenge of reaching the majority of learners in the Philippine public school system has been made more complex due to inequitable access to tech infrastructure. 

According to a recent survey conducted by the Social Weather Stations this 2021, four in ten Filipino students do not have access to any devices needed for distance learning. By recognising the crucial need to closely involve parents and further capacitate teachers for the new learning and teaching environment, TFP is able to continue rolling out its Functional Literacy Program and Life Skills program, reaching underserved communities whose learners are most affected by the widened learning gap brought on by the pandemic. By employing a mix of existing technology for alternative program delivery, TFP manages to make learning continuity possible for its partner communities’ learners, while providing capacity building support for teachers, and parents. 

All these closely align with the goals of this open challenge. 

Ma. Victoria Andrea A. Ungco

TFP’s functional literacy and life skills programs for parents and students in low resource public schools are innovative for the following reasons:

• TFP is the longest standing partner of the DepEd giving us unprecedented and considerable access to the public school system and the ability to pilot solutions that can be scaled later on. Our solution leverages this position in the system.  

• Our programs are rigorously tested and evaluated by our own internal research team whose mandate is anchored on accountability and measurement, not fundraising. We also engaged IDInsight, a research organization, last school year to conduct a process evaluation of these programs, with promising results. 

• Our solution uniquely and intensively invests in parents’ or guardians’ capacity-building, an important lever in ensuring learning continuity in the new normal. We also heavily invest in and leverage data.

• Our programs are robust and logical in design but flexible enough to fit various modalities. In other words, depending on the context of specific communities, there’s room to adjust program delivery for relevance. This means utilizing offline and online means such as community and home visits where possible, chat- and SMS-based instruction and monitoring, video call/messaging, google suite for data collection and even radio broadcast and Facebook groups.   

Yes. TFP began implementing the first iteration of its functional literacy program in 2018, starting in one public elementary school in Pampanga, a province north of Metro Manila. From this pilot, the program scaled to 10 schools in 2019 across different provinces in the country. In 2020, we had to reassess and adjust the design given the demands of distance learning so next school year would effectively be the fourth run of the same general approach. 

For the life skills program, our pilot began in 2015 and has proceeded every year since then with ongoing iteration, contextualization and programmatic improvement. Since its pilot, this program has reached thousands of public school students and parents/guardians/educators.

As mentioned earlier, our programs are robust and logical in design but flexible enough to fit various modalities. This is especially crucial in the Philippine context where there is no strong and reliable technological infrastructure especially in low resource areas whether that’s in rural or urban areas. Digital literacy is also significantly low across the board, at least amongst our education stakeholders. 

What this means is that for our programs to succeed, we would need to utilize offline and online means such as community and home visits where possible, chat- and SMS-based instruction and monitoring, video call/messaging, google suite for data collection and even radio broadcast and Facebook groups.   

This means that a variety of support may be needed to power the implementation of the solution: from providing digital devices to our target beneficiaries including our teachers to subscriptions, to online and digital services in order to support our instructional and data collection needs. 

The systemic challenges faced by the Philippine education sector demands a systemic and collaborative approach. As an organization, we face these challenges by listening to and understanding stakeholders across various levels, while we work toward aligning reform in different elements of the system under a single motivation: para sa bata (“for the children”). Our unique approach looks at sourcing and leveraging both fresh and existing talents to work in education reform. 

With the COVID-19 pandemic escalating and informing many areas for development in the country, Teach for the Philippines aims to reshape and adapt our education programs to suit the needs of our communities and network of partners (with the government and private sector organizations) for systemic and sustainable impact while navigating this new normal in Philippine education.

Founded in 2012, Teach for the Philippines has three flagship programs aimed at addressing the challenge of improving the quality of Philippine education,

1. Fellowship Program (2013). We recruit and train public school teachers - attracting both non-education majors and education majors to our work. Throughout their two-year teaching contract with Teach for the Philippines, our teachers meet their students where they need us. Our training for new teachers improves student learning outcomes by focusing on psychosocial support, improved teacher-student relationships, cooperative and experiential learning geared towards the students’ self-determination, and collaborative projects with the whole school community (co-teachers, parents, and local barangay officials). This is the program that the proposed solution is folded under. 

2. Ambassadors Program (2015). Societal change sustained through generations is going to require collaborative action from the government. We encourage our teachers who finish teaching with us for two years to consider an additional one-year opportunity to work in the government as Technical Assistants and experience public policy and decision making  first-hand.

3. Public School Teacher Pathway (2018). This program offers the two-year training curriculum and personalized coaching program to already licensed and tenured Department of Education (DepEd) teachers in the hopes of building sustainable and positive change into the system. 

Recognizing the importance of measuring progress towards goals in education through strong Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning, the mandate of TFP’s Data and Impact Assessment (DIA) team is to enhance the organisation’s operations by providing empirical proof of its outcomes. The DIA team strives to achieve this by strategically investing in two interconnected pillars that form the core of its work which affects TFP as an organisational network. Data Systems, which involves building a pipeline for collecting and storing relevant org-wide data for analysis and reporting, is the first pillar on which the DIA team is built on. The second pillar, Research, focuses on investigating key aspects of TFP’s core programs with the goal of building evidence around the organisation’s impact on education reform. 

TFP envisions a Philippine education system with functionally literate learners equipped with necessary life skills to succeed. To achieve this, TFP runs its student programs, the Functional Literacy Program (FLP) and life skills program, developed based on current research and by subject-matter experts. TFP is dedicated to continuous improvement of such programs and operationalizes this through rigorous MEL practices. Embedded in this practice are the development and continual revisiting of program logic, execution of evaluation agenda given priority areas of investigation, baseline and endline quantitative and/or qualitative results reporting, and daily monitoring of implementation progress. Last year, TFP hired global data analytics and research organisation IDinsight to conduct rapid evaluations (including a Process Evaluation and Qualitative Interviews) based on the student programs’ Theories of Change.

We’d like to impact more parents and students in low resource communities through our programs, with the goal of amplifying our reach and scale by at least 10% growth each year. 

We would also like to more rigorously measure the outcomes of our programs through comparison groups if not experimental design as well as explore more mixed methods for our life skills and teacher development programs. 

We have internal teams dedicated to government relations and placement and program development to ensure that we continue to place in areas that would benefit the most from our inputs and we also have an internal research team dedicated to evaluating our impact and working with experts to independently investigate and assess our model. We also have a robust fundraising strategy that hopefully ensures sustainability and feasibility of these goals.

As a non-profit organization, financing is always a challenge with each year kicking off fresh fundraising cycles and programmatic needs that need to be supported. Despite the challenges of the pandemic, our team has managed to fully fundraise the last fiscal year and continues to engage a healthy pipeline of funders and supporters to ensure program continuation. 

As for technology, our team works with external partners that can help augment our resources for this either through equipment or device donations or cash donations for our partner public schools that can fund the sourcing of equipment that are critical to ensuring learning continuity in a remote set-up. 

And lastly, for cultural barriers where communities are not outright receptive to technology or innovations, we invest heavily in community mapping, communication and capacity-building to address the issues and concerns surrounding the adaptation of new approaches and technologies even in spite of scarce resources. We always highlight context, listening and support in our approach to working with our stakeholders. 

Teach for the Philippines is a for-purpose, non-stock, non-profit organization that works to ensure all Filipino children benefit from an excellent, inclusive, and relevant education.

Founded in 2012, TFP focuses its efforts on improving teacher quality and addressing education challenges at the system-level. Through its three core programs, the organization builds a movement of high-potential Filipinos who can improve student learning outcomes, spark positive change in public school communities, and set reforms in motion to transform our public schools to become that which our children deserve, and that which our country needs.

Teach for the Philippines stands on the shoulders of a giant: Sa Aklat Sisikat Foundation (SAS). SAS created a 30-day reading program which was proven by the MIT J-PAL Poverty Action Lab to have significant positive impact in the reading skills of participating students (Linden, Leigh, Baafra Abeberese, and Todd Kumler, 2013). 

Today, as a way of expanding the impact of SAS, oriented towards learning and built on a foundation of research, evidence, and operational excellence, TFP has grown into a nationwide movement that has engaged over 300 Filipino teachers and community leaders who are committed to work towards meaningful and positive change. And so, driven by a passion for expanding opportunities for public school students across the country, Teach for the Philippines aims to transform the public school system to become the best that it can be.

We have 9-10 on the team. On Sustainability, you have the Chief Operations Officer, Partnerships Director and Government Relations Manager. On Programs, you have the Chief Program Officer, Program & Training Director and Manager, and Functional Literacy Program and Life Skills Program Associates. And on Research, you have two Data Managers. 

We have structured our team along three key areas that we believe are critical to the success of this solution: programs, sustainability and research. 

Our team is also composed of highly qualified and experienced professionals who have multiple years of experience working in education and development in the country. They have been with the organization for at least 3 years with some having worked with us for 7 years, more than enough to learn important context and gain solid implementation experience. Overall, there is high trust and high accountability within the team. We are not afraid to ask hard questions about our work and we are not wedded to previous approaches especially if they are found to be sub-optimal. We believe in shipping fast and iterating quickly, ultimately aiming for relevance and usability, instead of perfection.  

Breaking down the team into three areas allows us to streamline the work while maintaining focus and necessary specialization. The Programs team involvement ensures sound design and implementation planning. The Sustainability team ensures adequate supply and management of resources needed for the project as well as buy-in from key internal and external stakeholders, while the Research team keeps us accountable to tracking outputs and outcomes dynamically.

Our Team Lead is the organization’s Chief Operations Officer and also served as the Data & Impact Assessment Director previously. As COO, she helped shepherd the organization through the challenging transition to the new normal brought by the pandemic, ensuring financial stability and operational continuity. 

As former DIA Director, she led the team that developed and implemented systems for programmatic monitoring & evaluation and designed and field-tested research methodology for program improvement and the replication of effective solutions. She also managed and led the roll-out of many innovation-driven products and projects within the organization and helped ensure that staff, stakeholders and partners are trained in understanding and applying global best practices in monitoring and evaluation, data management and evidence-based strategy development.

She also managed the roll-out of a small-scale pilot evaluation of TFP's Fellowship program in Surigao del Norte, Philippines, in partnership with research affiliates from The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) and Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), and led the revamp of the organization's Data Management Framework. Finally, she supervised and led the most recent engagement of IDInsight with the organization for our programs’ process evaluation. 

TFP collaborates with various National and International Institutions, allowing the organization to create programs and projects that help capacitate school communities, policymakers, and education stakeholders. Last June 2021 a virtual forum was organized by TFP and Teach for all Network (Bangladesh and Cambodia) entitled, “Frontlining Education: Exploring Teacher Quality Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic”. The event, supplemented by the ADB Knowledge Product, served as a platform for policymakers, civil society organizations, and education stakeholders to learn more about the plight of teachers as they navigate learning amid this pandemic. 

To inform our progress towards outcomes and to enhance our understanding of the school communities’ context during the pandemic, in SY 2020-2021, TFP worked with the global advisory research organization IDinsight. For School Year 2020-2021, TFP worked to test a learning model where teachers support guardians, who in turn taught the students. These efforts guided our teacher training, facilitated through the Community Engagement (COMET) Program, and helped us improve the teacher-parent partnership, equipping over 2,000 students and 400 parents with skills to cope with and thrive in distance learning.

Teach for the Philippines has always aligned its programs for the benefit of underserved learners by working towards equitable access to quality learning opportunities and improving literacy, numeracy, and socio-emotional skills of its program beneficiaries. We believe that our organizational mission and vision are well-oriented towards the dimensions of the Octava Social Innovation Challenge. TFP has further strengthened its commitment to showing up where we are most needed, prioritizing physical deployment of our teachers despite the risks. We know that proximity matters greatly as we operate in an educational landscape that requires flexible solutions to bridge the increasing learning gap. 

We are applying for this grant in an effort to secure the additional resources needed to achieve our goal of amplifying our reach and scale by at least 10% growth each year. This will allow our programs to impact even more parents and students in low resource communities across the country. Likewise, we see this grant as an opportunity to connect our learners in need to an expanded network of edtech innovators that can provide much needed tools and infrastructure to strengthen and increase sustainability of our program delivery across various modalities.

Lastly, we also look forward to learning from experts in Octava Foundation’s network that can help us optimize our operations and improve some aspects of our work that are tangential but crucial to program delivery. These include communications, PR and technical support. 

TFP deeply recognizes that the important work of education reform in our country is something we cannot do alone. As such, any support that we can get on strengthening and widening our network connections, including getting expert guidance on talking about our work and better articulating our full model and strategy, would always be welcome and can only make us stronger as an organization. Often, as a team that’s focused primarily on program delivery and tracking outputs and outcomes, the important work of communication and making more advocates and partners falls to the sidelines. We recognize that this is an important aspect of our work that we need to lean more into and would appreciate more support on.  

Technology and technical support is also always needed especially in identifying what tools we can leverage to help optimize our work further or solution our back-end and programmatic challenges. In essence, as a lean organization with limited technical capabilities, we would appreciate expertise that can shed light on “what we don’t know” in order to more intelligently craft solutions to some of our long-standing pain points.