The school chooses 75 new students every year. Once a student has been accepted, he or she receives transport money, uniforms and shoes, lunch every day and specially designed textbooks. The Centex school day is longer than at other schools from 8.00 to 3.00 and there are 35 teachers for 500 students. That means 25 students per classroom which is a huge contrast to the public schools where the numbers can be as high as 600. Teachers also get an additional 2000 pesos added to their monthly salaries and they are trained by in-house teacher trainers and mentors, funded by Ayala.

In terms of curriculum, Centex has incorporated self-esteem as a subject which deals with things like conflict resolution skills, identifying problems and solutions. Parents also get special training on the subject of ‘discipline with dignity’ with the motto ‘praise in public and correct in private’. Students stay in the school until the 6^th grade (12 years old) and are then matched up to a secondary school.

In stark contrast to the Centex school, we next visit a public school, the Antonio Villegas Vocational High School. It is in Tondo, not far from the temporary warehouse housing we visited a week ago. As soon as we walked in, students exploded into noise, some of it jeering, all of it loud! There are 2,235 students in this school, 64 teachers, which means 25 students per class. The school curriculum provides 6 professional subjects: garments, food technology, cosmetology for the girls, automotive technology, building construction and electronics technology for the boys. The school partners with companies so that the employment rate on leaving is high.

We are visiting because this school is a beneficiary of Ayala’s GILAS programme, which brings internet literacy to public schools. All 2^nd year students upwards have internet lessons, with one computer for every 3 students.

The school staff then serve us a delicious lunch at 10.00 a.m. A huge plate of white rice and fried fish and bananas, and a very fragrant and delicious soup of chicken, papaya and green pepper leaves. It is called Tinolang Manoch soup and was Dr Rizal’s  favourite dish. Dr Rizal is the Philippine’s national hero: a doctor, a poet and a freedom-fighter, shot at dawn by the Spanish in 1896 for suspected treason.