Release Date :
Reference Number :
2015-029
Out-of-School Children and Youth Prevalence in the Philippines
The 2013 Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) covered around 36 million population aged 6 to 24 years. According to the survey, one in every ten or about 4 million Filipino children and youth was out-of-school in 2013. Out-of-school children is defined in the FLEMMS as persons aged 6 to 14 years who are not attending school while out-of-school youth as persons aged 15 to 24 years who are not attending school, have not finished any college or post secondary course, and are not working.
Out-of-school children and youth in ARMM comprised 14.4 percent, which is the highest across regions. Six regions have proportion of out-of-school children and youth higher than the national figure at 10.6 percent, namely, SOCCSKSARGEN, Davao, Central Luzon, Zamboanga Peninsula, Caraga and MIMAROPA (ranging from 11.2 to 12.3 percent). Meanwhile, the proportion of out-of-school children and youth was lowest in CAR at 7.1 percent.
In general, the proportion of persons who are out-of-school was higher among the youth than among children. Excluding CAR, the proportion of out-of-school youth across regions ranged from 14.5 percent to 20.4 percent. For children, the figure ranged from 1.7 percent to 4.9 percent, except ARMM with 10.9 percent. In terms of gender, the proportion of out-of-school children and youth was higher among females than males in all regions (Table 1).
Top Reasons for Not Attending School
The 2013 FLEMMS results also showed that of the nearly 4 million out-of-school children and youth, 22.9 percent have entered into union or marriage. Another 19.2 percent cited insufficient family income to send child to school as the reason for not attending school (this refers to all educational expenses other than tuition fee), while 19.1 percent lack the interest in attending school.
Among females, 4 out of every 10 have already entered marriage while 3 in every 10 males have no interest in attending school. The proportion of out-of-school children and youth whose family income was not sufficient to send child to school was 22.7 percent and 17.0 percent, among males and females, respectively (Figure 1).
Technical Note
The 2013 Functional Literacy, Education and Mass Media Survey (FLEMMS) is a nationwide survey covering around 26,000 sample households. The survey seeks to gather information on the basic and functional literacy status, educational skills qualifications of the population, and exposure to mass media. For this survey round, Region VIII was not incorporated due to typhoon Yolanda.
