THE Second Congressional Commission on Education or EDCOM 2 will conduct a study visit to Vietnam from March 21-24, 2024.

The Commission seeks to learn from Vietnam’s education sector in improving access, equity, and opportunity; attracting and supporting qualified teachers; strategic use of assessments and effective governance and efficient financing of education.

EDCOM 2, the Congressional body created through RA11899, is tasked to undertake a comprehensive national assessment and evaluation of the performance of the Philippine education sector.

In the next three years, it will also recommend legislation to address the education crisis in the country.

As part of this mandate, the Commission conducts study visits around the country, and abroad to learn best practices and key strategies to pursue to uplift the quality of education in the Philippines.

“We want to learn from Vietnam because its stage of economic development and level of education spending are not far from ours, and yet their learners are way ahead of ours. Looking at Vietnam’s example, we particularly want to learn how we can be efficient with our spending to improve learner outcomes,” Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, co-chairperson of EDCOM II said.

While Vietnam is in a similar economic phase as the Philippines, it performed better in the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

Vietnam’s average score was way above the Philippines’, despite the former spending roughly the same amount on education as a proportion of GDP.

The Philippines spends an equivalent of around P55,000 per learner every year from Kindergarten until age 15.

The same factor in Vietnam is P69,000.