In the postpandemic era, the Batasan Hills National High School in Quezon City stands out for attempting to pioneer blended learning for its more than 15,000 students.

With only 90 classrooms fit for 3,500 learners and no space to build more rooms, the administrators split Grades 7 to 10 students into morning and afternoon shifts, and then introduced the in-person-online class setup in school year 2024–2025.

Grades 9 and 10 learners show up on campus three days a week and go online the rest of the week. Alternately, Grades 7 and 8 students meet face to face twice a week and attend online classes thrice a week.

This blended schedule is rotated every month.  

“It’s impossible to accommodate all unless we come to class seven days a week or extend to night shift,” Joseph Palisoc, who introduced the hybrid modality when he took over as principal in June 2024, told CoverStory.ph.

Now the norm

Blended learning became the norm in primary, secondary and tertiary schools across the country as the emergency health crisis waned toward May 2023. Eventually, the Department of Education (DepEd) announced plans to institutionalize it.

That’s exactly what Palisoc has in mind, after getting support from DepEd officials in Quezon City and endorsement from Mayor Joy Belmonte.

But not everyone is buying it, even after Palisoc tweaked the arrangement by setting up “learning hubs” on campus—regular classrooms powered by internet and equipped with laptops and headsets—in which a subject teacher holds the online class as in “a call center.”

Only nine out of 10 students have smartphones, tablets, or computers at home. The rest need to log into computers at neighborhood internet shops for a fee. Classes are still interrupted by unstable internet connection, for both teachers and students.

But more than the digital divide, the matter of whether online classes are effective for a generation of learners struggling with literacy and numeracy is the bigger question. (See Filipino students’ functional illiteracy is a ‘real and widespread learning crisis’.) 

(The school itself has exempted some 500 “poor” academic performers in Grades 7 and 8 from the scheme so they can attend in-person classes five days a week for a more focused learning under master teachers.)

It’s all good that the DepEd has found ways to adapt to resource constraints, according to ACT Teachers party list Rep. Antonio Tinio.

“But these adaptations don’t necessarily lead to better learning outcomes; [they may lead to] even worse outcomes,” Tinio said over Zoom, echoing observations on the adverse impact of blended learning on Filipino students during the global health crisis.   

In 2022, the World Bank pegged the learning poverty among 10-year-old Filipinos at 91%, meaning nine out of 10 children struggle to read a simple text.  

The Senate Economic Planning Office, in a policy brief in 2022, said evidence from the pandemic confirmed that students “benefited less from remote education than from classroom learning.”

Besides, 2020 and 2021 test scores show the limited efficacy of remote education, it added, citing Asian Development Bank data. 

Palisoc said that in a single week, Batasan Hills students spend six hours in their online class and another six hours in their asynchronous class.

In the latter setting, the learners either do homework based on teachers’ instructions in the class group chat, or download their quarterly lessons from the platform called learning management system (LMS).

The DepEd introduced the LMS under its so-called Matatag curriculum as an option for students experiencing poor internet signal especially during fierce storms.

Burden on parents 

“If you ask the parents, the burden of teaching is tossed back to them in an online setup,” Tinio said, recalling the pandemic years that saw some parents fill out their children’s modules to meet requirements, or even sub for them in their online classses.

Besides, the DepEd’s “unwritten policy” that doesn’t require attendance in online classes poses problems to learning in the long run, the lawmaker added.

A mother of a then Grade 7 student at Batasan Hills National High School confirmed that 50% of his online classes in school year 2024–2025 were cancelled.

When she raised this issue with the class adviser, she was told that the cancellation was caused by the absence of some students, and that this was remedied by repeating the online lesson during the face-to-face class.

The mother doesn’t relish the idea of transferring her son—now enrolled at Grade 8 in this same school—to another public school, where she fears he might be bullied for being a new student.  

Said Palisoc: “In terms of performance, our children aren’t lagging behind. We still rank high in terms of national assessment.” He cited the school’s pool of 605 teachers for their “commitment.”

Biggest student population 

For the school year that opened on June 6, at least 15,159 children from around Barangay Batasan Hills—a warren of urban poor homes hemmed in by middle-class subdivisions—enrolled at the school. It’s the biggest student population in Quezon City, and also includes 755 Grade 11 learners attending on-campus classes five days a week in a separate building. 

With thousands of students streaming in and out of the campus every day, the school on IBP Road across from the House of Representatives complex has exemplified another dismal face of education in Metro Manila (pop.: more than 13 million).

Classroom shortage has been a serious problem since the 2000s, with 55 secondary students crowding in one classroom in school year 2002–2003, the Second Congressional Commission on Education (Edcom 2) said in its January 2025 report.

Congestion in the metropolis and nearby regions, including Region 4-A (Calabarzon), has resulted from high population “where rapid enrollment growth has outpaced the construction of new classrooms,” Edcom 2 said. “My feeling,” said Tinio, “is that this hybrid setup that’s being implemented in Metro Manila will be replicated in those regions.” To be concluded