Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte on Tuesday slammed the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) for its call to hire 30,000 public teachers and allocate ₱100 budget per year for the establishment of classrooms.

In a statement, Duterte claimed that the group's call is merely motivated by their "fascination for demands and goals that are unrealistic and impossible."

She also said that the ACT Teachers would just like to divert the public's attention from the damage that the New People's Army (NPA) caused in Masbate province which disrupted the learning of 55,199 students and 2,815 school personnel.

"The call could not be coming from a place of genuine concern for the future of our learners and the welfare of our teachers," Duterte underscored.

She pointed out that this year, the education department intends "to continue hiring additional teaching and non-teaching personnel" and "deploy more administrative officers in schools" to reduce teachers' workload.

"Instead of solely focusing on archaic and ineffective solutions, we will also tap into available technology to address current challenges," Duterte said.

The Education Secretary underlined that the Marcos administration would not be "pressured, hoodwinked, or distracted by groups like ACT Teachers."

"The Department of Education (DepEd) itself had stated that there are 91,000 new classrooms needed in the whole country to address its shortage tells us that the department has to work truly hard to fill this gap," Castro said.

Apart from this, she said the PH education system also needs to "hire 147,000 more teachers to cut down the class size to 35 students to have a healthy balance ratio of teacher and students to promote a more conducive learning atmosphere."