SENATE Committee on Basic Education chairman and EDCOM 2 co-chairperson Sherwin Gatchalian called on the Department of Education to open up education-related data for analysis.

“I heard about opening up the data sets. I think that’s an admission that we need help from experts, that’s a good admission. We also encourage the private sector to help analyze the data,” Gatchalian said.

The senator added DepEd should also develop its own capability and analysis since people will also rely on those analyses.

At the same time, Gatchalian stressed rolling out a massive intervention program is really daunting.

“Rolling it out as fast as we can, even as possible, taking into consideration the need to make it robust and customized to the needs of our learners is really challenging, but I’m happy to see that there are things moving,” Gatchalian said.

“What we need is national consolidated data and analysis because from my point of view, when we allocate the budget, we need to justify that budget. And we also need to look at the bigger picture. Of course the granular, municipality, division data are very important, but from a policy point of view, we also need to look at the bigger picture,” he added.