TL;DR: DepEd's official vision and mission, published on deped.gov.ph, commit the department to Filipinos who love their country and to quality, equitable, complete basic education delivered in a safe, child-friendly environment. Its four core values, Maka-Diyos, Maka-tao, Makakalikasan, and Makabansa, are meant to guide how teachers, learners, and staff behave day to day. Under the current grading order, DepEd Order No. 015, s. 2026, they no longer show up as a separate observed-values rating on the SF9 report card; instead they reach it through the graded GMRC / Values Education learning area and, for Kindergarten to Grade 3, a Character Traits Award. The whole framework traces back to Republic Act No. 9155, the Governance of Basic Education Act of 2001, which created DepEd's legal mandate and assigned specific authority to the national, regional, division, and school levels.
Teachers writing a school report, an accreditation document, or a bulletin board display, and parents trying to make sense of where "core values" show up on their child's SF9 report card, both run into the same question: what exactly does DepEd say its vision, mission, and values are, and where does that language come from? This post quotes DepEd's own published statements verbatim, explains the four core values and how each one is meant to apply, traces the legal basis back to RA 9155, and shows how the values actually appear on today's report card. Every quote below comes from deped.gov.ph or the text of the law itself.
What Is DepEd's Official Vision Statement?
DepEd's vision, as published on its official "Vision, Mission, Core Values, and Mandate" page, reads: "We dream of Filipinos who passionately love their country and whose values and competencies enable them to realize their full potential and contribute meaningfully to building the nation."
A vision statement is meant to describe a long-term, aspirational end state rather than something measured year to year. Unlike the mission (below), it doesn't specify programs or delivery mechanisms; it describes the kind of citizen the whole basic education system is ultimately trying to produce. Schools and divisions are expected to adopt this same vision language, sometimes displayed on office walls or division websites, rather than write their own separate version, which is why you'll see this exact sentence repeated across DepEd regional and division office pages nationwide.
What Is DepEd's Official Mission Statement?
DepEd's mission is "to protect and promote the right of every Filipino to quality, equitable, culture-based, and complete basic education where students learn in a child-friendly, gender-sensitive, safe, and motivating environment." The mission statement continues by assigning roles: teachers "facilitate learning and constantly nurture every learner," school heads "are competent managers of schools," and "family, community, and other stakeholders are actively engaged and share responsibility for developing life-long learners."
Where the vision describes an end goal, the mission describes how DepEd intends to get there and who is responsible for which part. That division of labor, teachers facilitate, school heads manage, families and communities partner, maps onto the governance structure that RA 9155 later formalizes in law.
Disclaimer: DepEd occasionally revises the exact wording of its vision and mission statements. Always confirm current phrasing against the live deped.gov.ph vision, mission, core values, and mandate page before quoting it in an official document.
What Are DepEd's Four Core Values?
DepEd's current published core values are four, each with a Filipino term and its English gloss:
| Core Value | Filipino Term | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| God-centered | Maka-Diyos | Acting with moral integrity and respect for a higher purpose beyond self-interest |
| People-oriented | Maka-tao | Treating others with fairness, empathy, and respect for human dignity |
| Environment-conscious | Makakalikasan | Caring for and protecting the natural environment |
| Nationalistic | Makabansa | Demonstrating love of country and commitment to nation-building |
These four values are the ones currently listed on deped.gov.ph. Some older DepEd materials, teacher training modules, and individual school handbooks reference a fifth value, Makatarungan (justice-oriented), which appeared in an earlier iteration of DepEd's values framework tied to the K to 12 curriculum's original core values list. If your school's printed materials or an older SF9 template shows five values instead of four, that's most likely a leftover from that earlier version rather than an error, but the department's currently published list has four. When in doubt for an official document, match whatever your division or school's current SF9 template actually prints, since that's the version being graded.
Where Does DepEd's Mandate Come From Legally?
DepEd's mandate is not just internal policy; it's created by law. Republic Act No. 9155, titled "An Act Instituting a Framework of Governance for Basic Education," known as the Governance of Basic Education Act of 2001, was signed on August 11, 2001. Section 2 of the law commits the State to "protect and promote the right of all citizens to quality basic education" and to make that education "accessible to all by providing all Filipino children a free and compulsory education in the elementary level and free education in the high school level."
Section 7 spells out where authority sits at each level of the system:
- National (Section 7.A): The Secretary of Education holds "authority, accountability and responsibility" for formulating national education policies, setting standards, and "monitoring and assessing national learning outcomes."
- Regional (Section 7.B): Regional directors develop regional education development plans and approve the establishment of schools within the region.
- Division (Section 7.C): Schools division superintendents implement division education development plans and manage division-level personnel and fiscal resources.
- School (Section 7.E): School heads set "the mission, vision, goals and objectives of the school" and implement the curriculum at the school level.
This is also why a public school's own posted vision statement, the one you'll often see near the flagpole or entrance, is usually a school-specific adaptation rather than a copy of the department-wide vision quoted above; RA 9155 explicitly gives that authority to individual school heads.
How Do the Core Values Show Up on a Learner's Report Card?
The SF9 report card, DepEd's official School Form 9, no longer carries a section that rates a learner's core values apart from subject grades. That block belonged to the now-repealed DepEd Order No. 8, s. 2015, whose Table 13 rated behavior against the four values on a scale of Always Observed, Often Observed, Sometimes Observed, and Rarely Observed. DepEd Order No. 015, s. 2026 repealed DO 8, and the SF9 templates annexed to it, Annex G for Grades 4 to 12 and Annex F for Grades 1 to 3, carry no such block.
Core values reach the report card differently now. GMRC / Values Education sits in the Learning Areas table on the Grade 4 to 12 template alongside Filipino, English, Mathematics, and the rest, graded per term like any other subject rather than rated separately. The parent letter printed on the template still says the report shows a learner's progress "in the different learning areas as well as his/her core values," but that line now describes the graded subject rather than a stand-alone conduct rating. For Kindergarten to Grade 3, DepEd Order No. 015 also introduces a Character Traits Award, granted at the end of each academic term and aligned to the DepEd core values, capped at five core awards per learner.
This matters for teachers because values now factor into a grade in GMRC / Values Education rather than a separate observation checked off apart from academics, and it matters for parents because a values concern shows up as a grade in that subject, not as a rating elsewhere on the form. For the full breakdown of what today's SF9 contains section by section, see our SF9 report card guide.
Disclaimer: SF9 formatting is periodically updated by DepEd Order. Verify the current template with your school registrar or division office before finalizing report cards.
How Does the Mandate Connect to CHED and TESDA?
DepEd's mandate under RA 9155 covers basic education only, meaning kindergarten through senior high school and the Alternative Learning System. It does not extend to college or technical-vocational education, which fall under the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) and the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) respectively. For a full breakdown of how these three agencies divide responsibility, see our guide on DepEd vs CHED in the Philippines.
Why This Matters for Teachers Writing Reports
Teachers preparing accreditation narratives, School Improvement Plans, or bulletin displays that cite DepEd's vision and mission should quote the current published wording exactly, since it's easy to paraphrase language that has since been slightly revised. A few practical pointers:
- Quote, don't paraphrase, for official documents. Copy the vision and mission directly from the current deped.gov.ph page rather than from memory or an old training slide deck.
- Check whether your school uses four or five core values in its own materials, and align new documents with whatever version your current SF9 template and division memo use.
- Cite RA 9155 by section, not just by name, when writing governance-related reports; Section 7 is the part most often referenced for who has authority over what.
- Remember the mandate stops at basic education. Don't cite RA 9155 as the legal basis for college-level or TESDA programs.
For more context on how the wider Philippine education system fits together, see our Philippine education system guide and parent's guide to education in the Philippines.
Ready to find the right school? Browse schools or compare programs and reviews across hundreds of Philippine schools on SchoolFinderPH.
Sources
- DepEd — Vision, Mission, Core Values, and Mandate (official)
- Republic Act No. 9155 — Governance of Basic Education Act of 2001, full text (LawPhil)
- DepEd Region III — Vision, Mission, Core Values, and Mandate
- DepEd National Capital Region — Mandate, Vision, Mission and Core Values
- DepEd Order No. 015, s. 2026 — Revised Guidelines on Classroom Assessment, Grading System, and Awards and Recognition, Annexes F, G and H (official PDF)
- SchoolFinderPH — SF9 Report Card Guide
- SchoolFinderPH — DepEd vs CHED in the Philippines
