This is Part 1 of a 2-part series on public education in Catanduanes Province. Part 2 will appear in next week’s edition.
Available evidence indicates that educational attainment in Catanduanes, commonly expressed as “mean years of schooling”, has improved significantly over the long term. Nowadays, adults in Catanduanes Province have completed roughly 9 to 10 years of formal schooling, on average.
However, the province nevertheless lies in the bottom half of all provinces ranked on this measure.
The 2020 Census on Population and Housing shows that among the population aged 15 years and over, 31.8 percent reached only elementary level, 38 percent reached high school level and about 20 percent pursued college education.
This distribution implies an average educational attainment close to completion of junior high school — around 9–10 years. Estimates suggest that 20 years ago the figure was in the “low 8s” — 8.0 to 8.4.
Functional literacy
Worldwide, the relationship between mean years of schooling and functional literacy is highly correlated at approximately .75.
This implies that the longer a person goes to school, the better he or she can read and write.
The province’s functional literacy rate — for ages 10–64, with basic reading, writing, and computing skills — is reported at about 70.8 percent, indicating that a significant minority of adults have very limited schooling. This pulls the mean down despite a sizable high-school and college-educated group.
How this compares nationally
The Philippine national average of mean years of schooling for adults is now just above 10 years — around 10.4–10.5 years in the early 2020s.
Compared to the top-performing provinces — Batanes, Benguet, Rizal, Bohol — which often exceed 10–11 years, Catanduanes is clearly in the lower half of the national distribution.
And within the Bicol Region, Catanduanes usually ranks 4th or 5th out of 6 provinces on education attainment indicators, behind Albay, Camarines Sur, Camarines Norte, and sometimes Sorsogon, depending on the indicator and year.
So, Catanduanes, like several provinces in Bicol and Eastern Visayas, tends to sit slightly below the national average, reflecting higher shares of elementary-only and high-school-only attainment but lower shares of college graduates.
Among the Philippines’ 82 provinces, Catanduanes is well above the bottom 10 nationally, which are dominated by Mindanao and Eastern Visayas provinces such as Tawi-Tawi, Davao Occidental, Northern Samar, but it is also not in the top tier of highly literate provinces.
International comparisons
As regards mean years of schooling internationally, Indonesians have about 9.07 years, slightly below Catanduanes residents but up from about 8.85 in 2024. This corresponds to roughly junior-high completion.
Malaysia shows approximately 10.6–10.7 years of schooling, essentially upper-secondary level. But the government is attempting to raise that figure to 12.7 years by 2030.
In Hong Kong, the mean years of schooling is 12.8 years, according to World Bank data, placing it among the top 15 globally.
In Singapore, the number is 11.9 years for residents aged 25 and older.
Educational Achievement
While the above figures reveal literacy and mean years of education, they do not address education quality, which is measured internationally by the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA.
According to PISA results, the Philippine nation as a whole has made giant strides in educational achievement.
Basically, PISA is a worldwide study run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that measures how well 15-year-old students can apply their knowledge and skills in reading, mathematics, and science to real-life situations.
The exam has been conducted every three years since 2000. In 2025, 91 countries and 760,000 students participated in the tests.
PISA results are not made available at the provincial level, however. The reason for this is that PISA utilizes a stratified random sampling method to represent the country as a whole, so sample sizes at the provincial level are not large enough to compute statistics meaningfully.
Within the Philippines, the Bureau of Education Assessment assesses educational achievement with the National Achievement Test, part of DepEd’s broader national assessment program.
The DepEd also administers an Early Language, Literacy and Numeracy Assessment and exit assessments for Grades 6, 10 and 12.
However, results of these tests are not regularly published on a province-by-province basis.
The latest PISA cycle, released Sept. 8, shows a wide gap between the Philippines and the region’s top performers. The Philippines ranked 72nd in reading, 74th in mathematics and 77th in science.
The Philippines’ mean scores on the 2025 PISA were: reading, 367, mathematics, 371, and science, 373.
These represent gains of more than 20 points in reading and 16 points in mathematics compared with the 2022 cycle, the country’s best performance since it first joined PISA in 2018.
For context, the 2025 OECD worlwide averages were 461 in reading, 463 in mathematics and 443 in science, so the Philippines remains below the OECD averages despite the improvements.
In any case, 2025 witnessed the country’s strongest showing since it joined in 2018, and the OECD described the Philippines as the fastest-improving country in reading. Even so, nearly two in three Filipino students fall short of minimum proficiency in science, mathematics and reading.
Among neighboring countries, Singapore lies at the higher end of the distribution. Singapore was among the two highest-performing systems across all three domains.
Indeed, Singapore led the world in reading with 535 points.
Hong Kong is another high performer, with mathematics at about 522, on par with South Korea, though it is no longer improving. Indeed, its science scores fell by more than 20 points.
Malaysia and Indonesia are closer comparisons to the Philippines, but the picture is mixed. Malaysia’s science score rose three points to 419 and reading rose five points to 393, but mathematics fell by 11 points to 397.
Indonesia averaged 364 in mathematics and 365 in reading, well below the OECD averages of 463 and 461. Indonesia is gaining ground on its neighbour, however. The gap with Malaysia in mathematics nearly halved, from 62 to 34 points, over the past decade.
One caveat matters for interpretation. The OECD noted that PISA 2025 recorded the lowest OECD-average performance so far in science, reading and mathematics, so some of the Philippines’ relative gain reflects a weaker global baseline.
In summary, the overall pattern in the Philippines is a country rapidly improving from a very low base. It is still far from Singapore and Hong Kong, but it is in the same tier as Malaysia and Indonesia.
Bryce McIntyre, PhD, resides in San Andres. He holds a doctoral degree from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA. Perplexity AI aided in the research for this article.