The Department of Education recently launched the Learners TeleSafe Contact Center Helpline at the General Tiburcio De Leon National High School in Valenzuela City on Monday, with simultaneous rollouts in Iloilo City and Cagayan de Oro City.
Students calling the #33733 helpline can now be forwarded directly to counselors at the National Center for Mental Health, which Education Secretary Sonny Angara said would shorten the response time for learners in distress.
Under the new setup, a Learner Rights and Protection officer takes the initial call, conducts an assessment, and transfers the student to NCMH specialists when the case involves a mental health crisis or abuse.
Students can also reach the helpline at 09451759777 or weprotectlearners@deped.gov.ph, and Viber.
At a House appropriations committee hearing in September 2025, Angara said the country had only 4,069 licensed guidance counselors as of 2022, far from the more than 50,000 needed to meet the ideal global ration of one counselor for every 250 students.
He said the DepEd was creating “counselor associate” posts to help fill the gap, and warned that the more the 4,000 counselor vacancies budgeted for this year were unlikely to be filled in the next five years because universities were not producing enough graduates to meet the demand.
The DepEd has also recorded some 2,500 bullying cases for school year 2024-2025, which is an increase from the 2,268 cases logged the previous year. However, the number is believed to be only a fraction of the actual total, as bullying cases have typically been underreported.
In the 2022 Program for International Student Assessment, the Philippines had the highest percentage of students who said they were frequently bullied, at around 35 percent. PISA estimated the average in developed nations at just below 10 percent.
Any effort by the government, particularly DepEd, to address the growing issues of mental health and bullying among schoolchildren, is a positive step forward. A readily accessible helpline will hopefully provide better and more timely access to professional help while the shortfall in counselors is being sorted out, which given the decades of neglect and misplaced priorities, may take years, if not decades.
At this point, our school children that are dealing with mental health issues will take all the help they can get.*
