The Department of Education confirmed Wednesday that Self-Learning Modules for the last two quarters of the current school year will be procured from the private sector.

DepEd Undersecretary for Curriculum and Instruction Diosdado San Antonio said that SLMs for the third quarter and fourth quarters will be procured from private publishers and that they also plan to consider their developed SLMs.
San Antonio said that DepEd has long planned to procure the SLMs from the private sector.
“The main reason is we wish to allow our supervisors and master teachers to focus on their main tasks once the school year opened,” he said. “We could only bother them with SLM development during the extended break,” he added.
He said no SLMs were procured from the private sector for the first and second quarters as procurement protocols normally take time.
Procuring SLMs from the private sector, San Antonio said, is also in line with the efforts of the DepEd to further strengthen partnerships with the publishing industry.
He said that two meetings with private publishers have been facilitated by the National Book Development Board to discuss the partnership. The NBDB is under the administrative supervision of DepEd that is responsible for developing and supporting the development of the Philippine book publishing industry.
San Antonio said that as part of the efforts of DepEd to reduce the dependency on printed modules, the procurement of SLMs from the private sector will include rights to the digital versions.
“What we will procure will be the adjusted needs,” he said, adding that locally developed SLMs might still be used only for those where the private sector has no titles.
San Antonio said conformance reviewers from the regional offices have started doing their tasks as part of DepEd’s efforts to minimize the errors in the SLMs distributed to the students.
He said that conformance reviewers from the ROs will be asked to review the SLMs. “They will still be needed in evaluating the privately developed SLMs,” he added.