By Justine Irish D. Tabile, Senior Reporter

Weak foundational skills among Filipino students could undermine the competitiveness of the future workforce and require businesses to spend more on training new employees, according to an industry group.

Management Association of the Philippines (MAP) President Donald Patrick L. Lim said the improvement in the mean scores of Filipino 15-year-olds in the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was encouraging, but should not be celebrated prematurely.

“If only 21% of our students meet minimum proficiency in math, and around a third in reading and science, then we have a serious future workforce problem,” he told BusinessWorld in a Viber message.

“These are the same students who will enter our companies in a few years. If the fundamentals are weak, businesses will end up spending more time retraining people, and that affects our competitiveness,” he added.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) PISA 2025 study found that the mean scores of Filipino students had risen to their highest levels since the country joined the assessment in 2018.

However, most Filipino students still failed to reach the minimum proficiency benchmark in all three subjects.

Only 32% of Filipino students attained at least Level 2 proficiency in science, compared with the 74% average across OECD countries. In mathematics, just 21% reached the minimum proficiency level, versus 65% across the OECD. In reading, 31% reached at least Level 2 proficiency, compared with the OECD average of 69%.

PHINMA Education Country Head for Philippines Christopher “Happy” A. Tan said the latest PISA results showed that the learning crisis remained unresolved, with the Philippines still recording scores well below OECD averages.

“Being significantly below the OECD average tells us the learning crisis in the Philippines hasn’t been solved, only slightly eased. This also means that the country is moving in the right direction but from a very low starting point,” Mr. Tan told BusinessWorld in an e-mail.

He said the government should prioritize early childhood development, nutrition, foundational literacy and numeracy, early assessment, targeted remediation, and the capacity of teachers and tutors.

“We need to know not only how many students participate in remediation, but how many actually move to the right proficiency levels,” he added.

Mr. Lim said the results underscored the need to strengthen basic skills, including reading comprehension, mathematics, science, communication, and problem-solving.

“We also need much stronger industry-academe collaboration. For MAP, employability should be a key outcome of education, and industry should play a bigger role as a co-educator,” he added.

American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines (AmCham) Human Capital and Resources Committee Chair Ernie Cecilia said the results indicated that government interventions were moving in the right direction, although Filipino students remained behind their OECD peers.

“There is much work to be done in reforming the policies, standards, and practices in education and training in the Philippines in order for the Filipino workforce to be more globally competitive,” he told BusinessWorld in a Viber message.

He called for an “all-of-government and all-of-society approach” to education reform, including greater private-sector engagement and benchmarking against other countries.

PISA ‘NOT THE ONLY MEASURE’

Mr. Cecilia said PISA scores should not be the sole measure of the competitiveness of Filipino workers.

“Tests are generally good indicators of performance, but there is other proof,” he said, pointing to more than 12 million Filipino professionals working overseas and Filipino talent employed by multinational companies.

“In the Philippines, many large multinationals depend on Filipino talent to manage and run their businesses. This is also a testament to the competitiveness of the Filipino talent that is not shown by assessments of human potential, like the PISA,” he added.

Benjamin B. Velasco, an assistant professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman School of Labor and Industrial Relations, said PISA had faced criticism as a measure of educational attainment.

“PISA as an institution for educational assessment must be critically examined. Yet even without PISA, it is fair to say that there is consensus that the education system in the country does need reform and education outcomes of students has to be improved,” Mr. Velasco told BusinessWorld in a Viber message.

“Filipino workers do not really compete with the labor force in other Southeast Asian countries as the regional labor market is very limited.”

Still, Mr. Velasco said better-educated and highly skilled graduates would benefit the domestic economy because education and skills generally correlate with productivity.

The Philippines ranked last in science and sixth in mathematics and reading among the eight Southeast Asian countries included in PISA 2025.

Mr. Velasco said education and skills were only some of the factors considered by employers and global companies when deciding whether to hire or invest in the Philippines.

“Skill and education, including basic literacy and numeracy, of the labor force is just one factor among a variety of considerations by employers in hiring and also by global corporations in investing in the Philippines,” Mr. Velasco said.

Despite this, he said educating the next generation remained both an economic and human development priority.

Mr. Velasco also pointed to systemic challenges affecting the education sector, citing the lack of teacher representation in the Second Congressional Commission on Education 2.

“Putting resources and attention to education will definitely solve a lot of problems from lack of books to gadgets and classrooms. But even with a larger budget, if corruption is not rooted out, the added funds do not lead to intended outcomes,” he said.

“Reforms cannot be confined strictly with the education system but are bound up with other systemic problems,” he added.