The decade-long problem on textbook shortages is now a thing of the past.
The Department of Education (DepEd) on Wednesday announced an unprecedented procurement breakthrough after they successfully secured all 105 target textbook titles for public elementary and secondary schools.
The procurement covers learning resources required for the successive phases of curriculum implementation, beginning with Grades 1, 4, 7, and Senior High School (SHS) in 2024; followed by Grade 3 and Grades 2, 5, and 8 in 2025; and Grades 6, 9, and 10 in 2026, with all phases completed this year.
This milestone, the DepEd said, overhauls the national learning resource pipeline, delivering nearly four times the total number of titles procured across the prior decade combined.
The achievement addresses long-standing systemic bottlenecks highlighted by the Second Congressional Commission on Education (EDCOM II), which revealed that the agency managed to procure only 27 out of 88 required titles between 2014 and 2023.
The procurement of K-12 textbooks and teachers’ manuals for the Senior High School (SHS) Core Subjects has completed the bid opening stage with complete bidders in all lots and is currently undergoing the detailed evaluation of bidding documents, subject to the completion of the procurement process and award of contracts.
Upon contract award, the focus will shift to production, nationwide delivery, and logistics monitoring, with complete delivery anticipated by December 2026.
‘For ten years, our public school system was trapped in a cycle where procuring a single textbook title took up to three years, leaving millions of learners and teachers without the fundamental tools they needed,’ said Education Secretary Juan Edgardo Angara. ‘When 27 titles in a decade is your baseline, delivering 105 titles in a single year isn’t just an administrative achievement; it is a fundamental restoration of service to our learners. We dismantled unnecessary bottlenecks, strictly enforced timeline discipline, and proved that transparency, speed, and quality control can go hand-in-hand to ensure our schools receive complete, high-quality learning resources without delay.’
Progress accelerated through incremental policy adjustments, rising from 31 percent completion during the 2014-2023 period to 57 percent across 2024 and 2025 combined, before hitting 100 percent completion this year.
The operational shift stems directly from the implementation of DepEd Order No. 008, series of 2025, which introduced strict timeline limits, mandatory blind content evaluations, and the elimination of redundant review cycles.
Under these updated policy guidelines, initial technical checks are completed within five days, content evaluation is strictly capped within a 90-calendar-day framework, and price considerations are decoupled from material quality scoring.
Once a title passes all quality assurance stages, it proceeds directly to procurement without further text modifications, effectively ending the multi-year approval delays that previously starved classrooms of up-to-date instructional materials.
Under the new governance framework, responsibility is clearly delineated across all organizational levels, from Central Office oversight to delivery monitoring by regional offices, school division offices, and school principals.
All 105 approved printed and electronic textbook titles are now moving through procurement and nationwide distribution for classroom implementation.