A new digital platform is looking to fix what its founder calls one of Philippine public education's longest-running "ills": a promotion system where personal connections and cash can matter more than merit.
Aunell Ross Angcos, founder of Tuklas Technologies and a former teacher himself, discussed the platform in an interview on Morning Matters (One News). He said the app was born out of his own experience with the career progression system, where advancing requires teachers to accumulate "points" backed by credentials — training certificates, seminar attendance, and similar documentation that is often still tracked on paper.
Digitizing credentials, cutting out fake certificates
The app lets teachers organize their credentials in a single digital file in two ways: by photographing and uploading existing physical certificates for verification, and — going forward — by receiving new credentials (from CPD units, trainings, and similar programs) directly in digital form from providers, rather than as physical paper certificates.
Angcos said the shift is partly a response to a problem uncovered in the platform's own research: fake certificates circulating in the training and conference ecosystem that teachers rely on for promotion points.
The platform is built for public elementary and high school teachers under the Department of Education (DepEd), and falls under the oversight of the Teacher Education Council (TEC) — the interagency body that includes DepEd, CHED, TESDA, the PRC, and the NCCA. Teachers will create accounts and link them to their national ID for cross-verification.
A marketplace for legitimate training
Angcos also pointed to a recurring complaint from teachers: paying out of pocket, sometimes thousands of pesos, to attend seminars or workshops — including cases where provincial teachers spent weeks in training only to find the program wasn't legitimate. The app is meant to function as a kind of marketplace or "one-stop shop" pointing teachers to government-funded, verified seminars and training instead.
Beyond career tracking: a national teacher database
Angcos said teacher data in the Philippines is currently scattered across different agencies. He wants the app to eventually consolidate that into a single, reliable dataset — one that could help identify, for example, regional shortages of teachers in specific subjects like English, Math, or Science, and give regulators and policymakers better information to work from. An offline-capable version is also planned for teachers in areas with unreliable internet access.
On data privacy, Angcos make sure that the system uses encryption and is designed around best practices, with TEC responsible for oversight of data integrity and security.
What's next
Angcos said the next phase for Tuklas Technologies is a companion app for students — a much larger undertaking given that students vastly outnumber teachers, though he said the company's systems are built to handle millions of users. The platform also incorporates AI features, which Angcos described as localized and built with a "human in the loop" rather than full automation. He estimated the teacher app could eventually reach roughly a million users nationwide.