EDUCATION Secretary Leonor Briones gave assurances that her department has adopted measures to promote education for sustainable development, stressing that this calls for shared responsibility with stakeholders.

“Learning, including education for sustainable development, is a shared responsibility. We need to integrate planning and to pull resources and ensure that we are able to connect various learning spaces, formal and informal, physical and virtual and in-person and remote that supports social and active learning and provide access to learning resources that enrich learning,” Briones said at the UNESCO World Conference over the weekend.

The DepEd chief added that promoting ESD is one of the agency’s priorities as she laid out the Department’s efforts in researching, monitoring, and institutionalizing policies and programs for sustainable development.

“The Philippine Department of Education recognizes the urgency to deepen our commitment and action to inculcate among our learners the awareness, knowledge, values, and capacity for sustainable development through education and learning,” she said.

“We have convened the Education Forum for Inclusive Quality Education or Educ Forum. [Our] partners, including civil society organizations, education sector organizations, and foundations coming from the private sector, bilateral agencies, and multilateral organizations, shall ensure that education for sustainable development will be among its key areas of work,” Briones shared.

The department through the Education Futures Programme, is collaborating with various stakeholders in creating integrated designs of future learning spaces to cover formal, informal, physical, virtual, and remote spaces, including ESD.

The pandemic has widened the department’s perspective and increased community participation regarding learning space and processes despite the distance, Briones said.

“The disruption of in-school learning, delivery at a large scale, has necessitated that we reach out to households and communities to be active partners in the learning process,” she said.