First Grade Opens in Filipino and English Before Bikol Ever Reaches the Board

A first-grader in Camarines Sur can name every part of a coconut in Bikol. Sit her down with a Filipino or English worksheet on day one, and the same child goes quiet. She is not slow. She is being asked to decode languages she has never lived in, before anyone has taught her to read the one she has.

Republic Act No. 12027 lapsed into law on October 10, 2024 without President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.'s signature, taking effect on October 12, 2024. It amends Sections 4 and 5 of RA 10533, the Enhanced Basic Education Act of 2013. Carried into classrooms through DepEd Order No. 020, s. 2025, it moves the medium of instruction for Kindergarten to Grade 3 to primarily Filipino and English starting School Year 2025–2026, and makes mother-tongue instruction optional, kept only in monolingual classes that meet the law's criteria. The mother-tongue years were supposed to be the on-ramp. Learn to read in the language on your own street, then bridge into Filipino and English once the reading part is solid. That on-ramp is now the exception, not the default.

The Bridge Gets Narrowed Before Everyone Crosses It

The logic sold to parents is simple and hard to argue with over dinner: Filipino and English are the test languages, the job languages, the ticket out. Parents who watched relatives leave for Riyadh and Milan know exactly what English buys. So when the primary medium shifts on the first day, plenty of families nod.

The order does keep regional languages, Bikol among them, as auxiliary media of instruction through translanguaging, alongside Filipino Sign Language. Bikol was among the first languages used when MTB-MLE began under DepEd Order No. 16, s. 2012 in School Year 2012–2013. The question is what a six-year-old does when Bikol drops from the language she reads in to the language a teacher reaches for on the side.

Reading research on multilingual kids keeps landing on the same finding: children learn to read faster and stay in school longer when the first letters they sound out belong to a language they already speak. Lean on an auxiliary role and you risk kids memorizing shapes instead of reading words. They pass the recitation. They cannot tell you what the sentence meant.

Who Absorbs the Cost

The kid who has a parent working a call-center headset, or an English-speaking lola, catches up. The kid whose household runs entirely in Bikol, whose books at home are church readings and a barangay flyer, falls behind on week one and stays there. The gap the shift is supposed to close opens wider inside the same classroom.

Teachers see it before any test score does. They watch which children stop raising hands. They translate on the fly, leaning on Bikol as the auxiliary the order allows, because the printed material assumes a fluency the roster does not have. Education advocates have flagged for years that mother-tongue instruction was rolled out with almost no funding for Bikol readers, trained teachers, or printed material in the language. Now the fix on the table narrows it rather than resourcing it.

What the Assessment Measures

Any early-grade assessment written in Filipino and English tells you, in part, which children arrived at school already speaking those languages. In Bicol, that tends to sort kids by household income and by who has family abroad, then read the result as achievement. That sorting follows the child into high school tracking and into who gets told they are university material.

Nobody is arguing Bicolano kids should skip English or Filipino. They will need both, and they know it. The argument is about the order. Teach a child to read in the language she thinks in, then hand her the others, and she carries all of them. Reverse it, and first grade becomes a language exam she was set up to struggle through before she could sound out her own name.