Four days before the opening of classes on Oct. 5, the Department of Education (DepEd) on Thursday reported that the enrollment at the basic education level for this school year has reached 24.72 million.

Based on the national enrollment data as of Oct. 1, DepEd reported that it has achieved 89.01 percent of the enrollment in School Year (SY) 2019-2020 with the current enrollment turnout of 24, 720, 714 for both public and private schools.

A total of 22, 500, 863 students will start their classes this coming Monday. DepEd said that this figure comprised 99.68% of last school year’s enrollment. Meanwhile, enrollment in private schools is currently at 2,165, 196 or 50.30% of the SY 2019-2020 enrollment.

DepEd’s national enrollment data covers public and private schools as well as State Universities and Colleges (SUCs) and Local Universities and Colleges (LUCs) and learners across all basic education level including Kindergarten, Elementary or Grades 1 to 6, Junior High School (JHS) or Grades 7 to 10, and Senior High School (SHS) or Grades 11 and 12. Also included are non-graded learners with disabilities (LWDs) and those under the Alternative Learning System (ALS) program.

For SY 2020-2021, the Elementary level has the highest number of enrollees with 11, 848, 909 followed by JHS with 7, 807, 946. There are 2, 836, 518 enrollees in SHS and 1, 760, 923 in Kindergarten. There are also 394, 274 enrollees in ALS and 72, 144 non-graded LWDs.

Meanwhile, the highest numbers of enrollees for SY 2020-2021 were recorded from Region IV-A (Calabarzon) with 3.4 million followed by National Capital Region (NCR) with 2.6 million and Region III (Central Luzon) with 2.5 million.

In SY 2019-2020, enrollment data provided by DepEd’s Education Management Information System Division-Planning Service showed that the total number of enrollment on all sectors and level of education is 27, 790, 114 for both formal and informal systems.

Of this number, 27, 030, 391 are learners from Kinder to Grade 12 and 759, 723 are in the ALS program. There were 22, 572, 923 enrollees in public schools and 4, 203, 676 in private schools last school year.

To ensure the health and safety of both teachers and students amid the COVID-19 pandemic, DepEd has come up with learning delivery modalities that parents and students can choose from including (1) Face-to-Face; (2) Distance Learning which include Modular Distance Learning (MDL); Online Distance Learning (ODL), TV and Radio-Based Instruction (TV-RBI) and Blended Distance Learning (BDL) and (3) Homeschooling.

As instructed by President Duterte that there will be “no face-to-face classes until a vaccine has been found,” students will be learning inside their homes through the learning deliveries offered by the schools.