An Act Providing for the Establishment, Management, and Support of a Complete and Integrated System of Quality Education in the Bangsamoro

This is the region's education code, and the sentence that carries it is Section 54: the Bangsamoro Government “shall provide two parallel formal systems in delivering quality basic education – the ‘Public School System' and the ‘Public Madrasah System'”, both governed by common standards on curriculum, assessment, teachers, textbooks, infrastructure, management and quality assurance.

That is a real structural departure. Nationally, madrasah education reaches public schools as an enrichment program bolted onto the ordinary curriculum. Here it is a complete formal pathway with its own grade levels — Tahderiyah, Lower and Upper Ibtidaiyyah, Mutawassitah, Thanawiyyah — its own curriculum specifications, its own certificates and its own Thanawiyyah Diploma, overseen by a Director-General for Madaris Education sitting alongside the Directors-General for Basic, Higher and Technical Education. A child can go all the way through and come out with a recognized credential.

The code does other things worth noting. Islamic subjects and Arabic are taught to Muslim learners inside the public school system too. Mother tongue is the medium through Grade 3 in both systems. Bangsamoro history, culture and identity are integrated at every level, and made an express right of the learner. Peace education is a core component across all levels and delivery systems with its own dedicated funding. Corporal and humiliating punishment is prohibited. Schools must be allowed prayer spaces. Section 105 opens a civil service route for madrasah teachers who could not previously qualify.

And it takes over higher education. CHED-ARMM's powers, budgets, personnel and assets transfer to the Ministry, which now accredits, sanctions and can close institutions in the region — while the Minister sits ex-officio on the national Commission on Higher Education.

The Organic Law obliges the Bangsamoro Government to establish and support a complete and integrated education system as a subsystem of the national one. Beyond the mandate, the code answers a long-standing problem: a large share of the region's children were being educated in madaris whose credentials led nowhere in the formal system, and a large share of their teachers held Arabic and Islamic Studies degrees that could not convert into civil service eligibility.

The two-system design in Section 54 is the most consequential thing this Code does, and its promise rests entirely on the phrase “common standards”. On paper the two systems are equals — same standards for curriculum and competency, assessment, teachers, textbooks, infrastructure, management and quality assurance. In practice the Code's own text shows where the alignment breaks. The Public School System runs Junior High across Grades 7 to 10 and Senior High across 11 to 12. The Madrasah System runs Mutawassitah across Grades 7 to 9 and Thanawiyyah across 10 to 12. Those are different stage boundaries, which means a learner moving between the systems at Grade 10 is crossing a key stage in one and sitting mid-stage in the other — and the Code, for all its detail on curriculum content per level, says nothing about how transfers between the two parallel tracks work. For a design whose whole point is that families should be able to choose either without penalty, that is the gap most worth watching.

Section 105 is the other provision to read closely, because it gives and withholds in the same breath. Madrasah teachers had long been stuck: an Arabic or Islamic Studies degree, however distinguished, did not produce civil service eligibility, so permanent appointment was closed. The Code creates a special qualifying examination, grants a special license to those who pass, and exempts honor graduates from sitting it at all — a genuine and overdue opening. Then it adds that the eligibility “shall only qualify the appointee to permanent appointment to Mudarris and shall not be considered as a substitute to second level eligibility unless authorized by the Civil Service Commission”. So the door opens into one room. A Mudarris made permanent under this provision cannot move laterally into the wider bureaucracy on that credential. Whether that is a sensible boundary around a specialised qualification or a ceiling on a career is a judgement the Code does not make, but it is the kind of detail that decides whether parity is real.

What is missing is money. This is a 199-section code that establishes two parallel school systems, absorbs a national commission's regional functions, mandates a Community Learning Center in every municipality and city, requires regular funding lines for indigenous peoples' education and for peace education, and directs the creation of a Tribal University System — and Section 196 appropriates nothing, leaving it all to the annual budget. The Tribal University makes the point: mandated here in 2021, mandated again in BAA 64 in 2024, and still without a charter. The Code was passed and signed on the same day, 18 May 2021, which suggests broad agreement on the design. Building it was always going to be the harder part.