Philippines DepEd ARAL — AI reading-fluency recovery for struggling learners via Microsoft Reading Progress

The Philippines Department of Education (DepEd) launched the Academic Recovery and Accessible Learning (ARAL) programme in September 2025 in partnership with Microsoft Philippines, deploying AI-powered reading-fluency tools - primarily Microsoft Reading Progress and Reading Coach - across public schools to identify and remediate struggling readers.

Reading Progress uses AI to automate oral reading-fluency assessment, evaluating a student's accuracy, pace and pronunciation as they read a passage aloud and generating data for teachers within minutes. A companion pilot, READExcel, ran in three school districts of Cabanatuan City, while a separate rollout assessed learners in Bais City. By early 2026 the programme had reached 25 school districts, with a roadmap to 3,000 teachers across 1,500 schools during 2026; DepEd also launched Project AGAP.AI in January 2026 as the country's first nationwide AI-in-education integration programme, backed by Memorandum Order 003, 2026.

The READExcel pilot in Cabanatuan City identified 14 struggling readers at baseline, all of whom progressed out of the at-risk category following targeted AI-supported intervention. In Bais City, assessing 60 schools that previously took teachers two full days took two hours with Reading Progress, and more than 14,000 learners across those 60 schools have been assessed.

DepEd and Microsoft describe the evidence as promising but limited to small-scale pilots reported jointly by the two implementing partners; no independent RCT has been conducted. National scaling also depends on connectivity investment - DepEd committed to universal school internet by end-2025, though close to 12,000 schools remained offline at that point.