The figure was disclosed by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) during a Senate hearing on Wednesday.
Lawmakers reviewed the results of the agency’s 2024 Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey, a nationwide assessment of basic and functional literacy levels across the population conducted every five years.
Last year’s edition surveyed 572,910 individuals from 177,656 sample households throughout the country.
“If you look at the 2024 figure, there are 18 million students who the PSA detected are [junior and senior] high school graduates, but they are not functionally literate. Meaning they graduated from our basic education system, but they cannot read, they cannot understand and comprehend a simple story,” said senator Sherwin Gatchalian, chairman of the Senate basic education committee.
Around 79 million were considered to be functionally literate in the 2019 edition of the report, which defined the term as having reading, writing and numeracy skills.
