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The announcement comes a day after teachers, students and advocacy groups filed a petition calling on the Higher Education Commission not to proceed with its proposal to cut public education colleges.
MANILA, Philippines – The Higher Education Commission (CHED) will not conduct pilot tests general education (GE) curriculum recommendations. in 2026 while vowing to go through more comments from stakeholders.
The announcement came a day later teachers, students, and advocacy groups submitted petitions combined with separate position papers asking CHED not to proceed with its proposal to reduce GE units to 18 from the current 36.
CHED Chairman Shirley Agrupis, in a press conference on Wednesday evening, May 13, said the pilot implementation of the revised GE curriculum will be moved to 2028 instead.
“This is to give us time…to analyze and better read the various performances because we understand where they are coming from,” Agrupis said.
The decision was the result of a meeting between CHED, the Department of Education, the Second Parliamentary Commission on Education, and the Teacher Education Council on Wednesday afternoon.
The four government bodies also decided to form an inter-agency technical working group to examine the position papers this year. They are accepting further submissions until June 15.
So far, more than 250 institutions of higher education have submitted their positions. Agrupis said many of the claims “are worth considering.”
He admitted that critics have questioned the request of the CHED Technical Panel for General Education to join together. Philippine history and the Rizal course, and removed ethics as an independent subject in the revised curriculum.
Edizon Fermin, who leads the technical panel, also explained why they initially proposed the introduction of tests in the 2026-2027 school year, which begins in August.
“We thought it was good that we try to do it‘n in the teacher education curriculum that will be provided. So it seems that there are two opportunities that CHED is pursuing: To see the possibility of resetting GE at the same time we are reforming teacher education,” Fermin said.
(We thought it would be good to try it with the revised teacher education curriculum. So CHED was looking at two opportunities: To see the possibility of resetting GE at the same time we are resetting teacher education.)
In 2018, CHED reduced GE units from 60 to 36 following the implementation of the K to 12 program in the country. – Rappler.com
