The country is exerting all efforts to attain its education targets under the MDGs to improve quality, access and efficiency of education. Even as education has been identified as the central strategy for investing in people, reducing poverty, and building national competitiveness, the country has been cited as a "particularly striking example of under-performance" in educational reforms in the 2010 Education For All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report. Current policies have been cited as failing to make a difference in improving the education of the poorest Filipinos.
Among its other challenges, the Department of Education (DepEd) has perennially confronted the problem of classroom shortage. In SY 2009-2010 alone, the Department has a total of 18.2 million enrollees but was deficient by more than 100,000 classrooms in both elementary and secondary public schools. Budget allocations for classroom construction have never fully covered the needs of an increasing school population. The problem of shortage is exacerbated by damage to school buildings wrought by typhoons and other disasters. As the DepEd intensifies its campaign to enroll all school-age children, in line with its commitment to achieve universal participation, classroom requirements will rise even more. An additional challenge is the prospective passage of the bill on mandatory preschool education, which will require the construction of even more classrooms to accommodate incoming learners.