BESRA

Basic Education Sector Reform Agenda (2006-2010)

Department of Education, Republic of the Philippines, August 2005

The Department of Education (DepED) is currently implementing the Schools First Initiative, an effort to improve basic education outcomes through a broadly participated, popular movement featuring a wide variety of initiatives undertaken by individual schools and communities as well as networks of schools at localities involving school districts and divisions, local governments, civil society organizations and other stakeholder groups and associations.

Even as the Schools First Initiative seeks to improve the way all public schools perform now, the DepED is also undertaking fundamental reforms to sustain better performance. DepED is pursuing a package of policy reforms that as a whole seeks to systematically improve critical regulatory, institutional, structural, financial, cultural, physical and informational conditions affecting basic education provision, access and delivery on the ground. These policy reforms are expected to create critical changes necessary to further accelerate, broaden, deepen and sustain the improved education effort already being started by the Schools First Initiative. This package of policy reforms is called the Basic Education Sector Reform Agenda (BESRA). This document summarizes the contents of this agenda.