Department of Education (DepEd)

The Department of Education runs the country's basic education system: kindergarten to senior high school, public and private. It is consistently the largest department in the national budget, and the reason is structural: it employs the biggest workforce in government, maintains tens of thousands of school buildings, and buys the books and materials a school year runs on. Anyone who has sat in a public school classroom has touched something this budget paid for.

Its work falls into a few recognisable families: pay and benefits for teachers and non-teaching staff; the school building programme; learning materials and textbooks; school-based feeding; and subsidies that pay private schools to absorb students the public system cannot fit. The department is also where the education debate lands when it turns to hiring — new teacher items are created here, and their absence is felt first in the most crowded classrooms.

How it got here

DepEd's modern shape dates to Republic Act No. 9155 in 2001, which reorganized the old Department of Education, Culture and Sports into a department focused on basic education — a mandate whose lineage runs back to the bureau of public instruction of the American colonial period. The same act pushed authority down to the schools divisions and, in practice, to the principals. The Enhanced Basic Education Act, RA 10533, extended basic schooling by two years of senior high school in 2013. Controversy has been a steady companion: textbook and laptop procurement have surfaced in audit findings for years, which is why the department's supply lines get the scrutiny they do.

What the money buys

The single biggest use of the money is people: salaries, benefits, and bonuses for teachers, principals, and non-teaching staff across the public school system. Because the payroll is so large, a modest shift in hiring policy translates into enormous budget effects — which is why every discussion of new teacher items is also a budget story. The remainder builds and repairs classrooms, buys textbooks and devices, funds school feeding programmes, and pays private schools to take in students through contracting schemes.

Watch two lines in particular. The first is the classroom backlog: years of reported shortages mean the construction line is judged against a debt accumulated over decades, not a single year's need. The second is school feeding, among the most cost-effective interventions in the entire budget, whose coverage is a live political question. Both are decided here, in one of the biggest pools of money the government has.

Reading this year's proposal

Read the proposal against three questions. How many new teaching and non-teaching positions are created, and how does that compare with the number lost to retirement and resignation? Does the school building line show a serious attempt at the classroom backlog, or a maintenance-level effort? And after years of audit findings on textbooks and devices, is there visible movement toward procurement the department can defend? The tiles on this page supply the numbers; the words here are the map.