TL;DR: Before you chase paper, work out who legally holds your record now. If your basic education school closed, its learner records go to the Schools Division Office — DepEd's Citizen's Charter makes turning them over a condition of endorsing a private school's closure. If you simply lost your own copy, you do not have to travel: under DepEd Order No. 54, s. 2016 you can file at the nearest SDO and it works through the Learner Information System to reach the SDO that has your file. If the school's own copy is gone, DepEd's published checklist accepts substitutes — a sworn statement from any two classmates, principals or teachers, backed by graduation photos or a souvenir programme, plus a certified copy of a Form 137 or 138 held by a college or an employer. For a closed college, start with the CHED Regional Office; its charter has a Certification of Student Records service at ₱130.00 and three working days. And if genuinely nothing survives, PEPT and the ALS A&E Test exist precisely to certify people with no record of formal schooling.
Lost records feel like a dead end because the school you would normally ask is the thing that has disappeared. It is not a dead end. Philippine basic education records have a custody chain that survives the school, and there is a published substitution rule for when the chain breaks.
Start by identifying the custodian
| Your situation | Who to approach first |
|---|---|
| Public school, still operating, you lost your copy | The school, or the nearest Schools Division Office |
| Private basic education school that has closed | The Schools Division Office covering where the school was |
| School records destroyed by fire, flood or storm | The Schools Division Office, with substitute evidence |
| ALS or PEPT certificate lost | Bureau of Education Assessment, DepEd Central Office |
| College or university that has closed | The CHED Regional Office with jurisdiction over it |
| Tech-voc certificate lost | TESDA, through the office that issued the qualification |
Getting this right first saves the most time. People routinely spend weeks writing to a defunct school's last known address when the file has been sitting in a division office all along.
If you only lost your own copy
DepEd Order No. 54, s. 2016, the Guidelines on the Request and Transfer of Learner's School Records, sets out two tracks.
School to school. When a learner transfers, the receiving school enrols them in the Learner Information System, which notifies the originating school, which then sends the Form 137 directly. The order is explicit that learners, parents and guardians are not allowed to hand-carry the permanent record to the receiving school. If nothing arrives within the prescribed period, the receiving school raises it with the Schools Division Office.
Individual requests. You lodge the request at your nearest Schools Division Office. That office enters your details into the LIS; the SDO covering the school you last attended retrieves the Form 137 or prepares a certification, and the document comes back to the office where you filed. You claim it there.
That second track is the one most people do not know exists. You do not have to fly to the province where you went to Grade 6.
Where the Form 137 itself cannot be produced, the division office can work from the Report on Promotion (School Form 5), which schools forward to the division office at the end of each school year. That is the backstop copy of your grades. Our Form 137 and SF10 guide explains what the permanent record contains and covers request mechanics in detail.
If the school has closed
Private basic education schools do not get to close quietly. DepEd's 2026 Citizen's Charter describes the endorsement of voluntary temporary or permanent closure of private schools and states that the process exists partly to safeguard learners by requiring the school to provide timely transfer credentials, student records and personnel documentation to affected parties and the SDO.
The checklist the closing school has to satisfy names the documents it must turn over to the Schools Division Office Records Section at the end of the school year: School Form 9 (formerly Form 138, the report card), School Form 10 (formerly Form 137, the permanent record), anecdotal records for SNED learners, any unclaimed diplomas and any unclaimed Certificates of Good Moral. Current learners' transfer credentials go the same way.
So the correct question to the SDO is not "do you have my record" but "the school closed in year X — where were its learner records lodged." Bring the school's exact name, its municipality, and the years you attended. Schools change names and merge; the division office indexes by school ID as much as by name. Find your division through our directory of DepEd regional and division offices.
Where the closure was abrupt rather than endorsed — a school that simply stopped operating — the SDO is still the right first stop, because that is the office with the authority to trace it and with the SF5 submissions on file.
If the records were destroyed
This is the situation DepEd has written a specific rule for, and it is more generous than most people expect.
The Citizen's Charter service for issuing academic school records for CAV, framed by DepEd Order No. 048, s. 2017, includes two contingency checklists.
If the diploma is lost, the checklist accepts:
- A sworn statement of any two of the applicant's classmates, principals or teachers, supported by either the school graduation photos, the souvenir programme, or the graduation programme; and
- A duly certified copy of either Form 137 or Form 138 held on file by any tertiary institution, or a diploma or transcript of records on file with the learner's current or previous employer.
In case of non-availability of Form 137, the same two substitutes apply.
Read that again, because it changes what you should be looking for. Your old college's admissions file, and your first employer's HR file, are treated as legitimate evidence of your basic education record. So is a souvenir programme in a relative's cabinet. Before you conclude that nothing survives, check those three places.
One thing worth saying plainly, because the internet says otherwise: DepEd's published checklists do not ask for an affidavit of loss. The 2026 Citizen's Charter runs to more than six hundred pages, and the phrase appears in it only in travel-reimbursement rules, never in a learner-records service. The two contingency checklists above are the whole published substitution rule for a missing Form 137 or diploma. If a division office asks you for a notarised affidavit of loss, or for a barangay, police or fire certification of a calamity, that is a local practice rather than a national requirement — so ask the SDO what it wants in writing before you pay a notary, and ask which service it is processing your request under.
Replacing an ALS or PEPT certificate
If your credential came from the Alternative Learning System's Accreditation and Equivalency Test or from the Philippine Educational Placement Test, the record sits with DepEd's Bureau of Education Assessment, not with a school.
The Citizen's Charter lists verification and reissuance of the Certificate of Rating for the PEPT, the A&E Test, the NCAE and QEALIS, available online through a request form or onsite. The published fee is ₱50.00 for the copy of the COR or certification, plus ₱150.00 for shipping if you want it delivered rather than claimed in person. You will need a government-issued ID, and an authorisation letter if someone is claiming on your behalf.
Our ALS requirements guide covers what the A&E credential is and where it can take you.
If it was a college or university
Higher education has a different custody chain and a thinner one.
Start with the CHED Regional Office covering the institution's location and ask it to identify who now holds the closed school's records. CHED does not automatically hold every closed institution's complete files; custody may have been assigned elsewhere, and the regional office is the body that knows.
CHED's 2025 Citizen's Charter includes an Application for Certification of Student Records and Other Relevant Documents, available to the public, requiring a letter request and a photocopy of your transcript or diploma, with a fee of ₱130.00 and a total processing time of 3 working days.
If you file for a CAV through eCAV and CHED finds no record of you in what your institution submitted, the charter provides for a Negative Certification. That is an answer, not a refusal — it tells you the problem is in the institution's submissions to CHED. Our CHED CAV and eCAV walkthrough covers that process and the scope of CHED's authority over institutions.
If the school still exists but is refusing to release what it holds, that is a different problem with a different remedy — see when a school withholds your records.
When nothing survives
There is a formal route rather than a dead end.
The Philippine Educational Placement Test is a national assessment for learners in special circumstances, letting them resume schooling or obtain certification of completion by grade level within the DepEd formal system. DepEd's Bureau of Education Assessment accepts PEPT applications from learners from non-formal and informal education programmes and from learners who have incomplete or no record of formal schooling. It runs onsite at the BEA testing room in the DepEd Central Office in Pasig City and as a computer-based test.
A separate track exists for learners who attended schools without a government permit: PEPT for validation purposes, administered through Schools Division Offices, with a published registration fee of ₱200.00 per learner. That route requires having completed the grade levels to be validated without failed subjects.
The ALS Accreditation and Equivalency Test is the other door, certifying elementary or secondary-level learning acquired outside the formal system.
Both produce a credential that DepEd will itself certify and authenticate later, which matters if the reason you are chasing records in the first place is a job or a course abroad. Our guide to authenticating a TOR for use abroad covers what happens after you have a document in hand.
What to bring before you go anywhere
- Full name as it appeared in school, including maiden name, and any spelling variants.
- Exact school name, municipality, and years attended.
- PSA birth certificate.
- A government-issued ID, and an authorisation letter plus IDs if someone is going for you.
- Any fragment you still have: a photocopied report card, an old certificate, a graduation programme, a souvenir yearbook page, a photo with the school banner in it.
- Names of two classmates, teachers or principals who could execute a sworn statement.
That last item is the one people wish they had prepared. Contemporaries scatter, and the sworn statement route needs two of them.
Sources
- Department of Education — DepEd Citizen's Charter 2026 Edition (CAV services, private school closure endorsement, PEPT and COR reissuance)
- DepEd Order No. 54, s. 2016 — Guidelines on the Request and Transfer of Learner's School Records (official PDF)
- TeacherPH — Guidelines on the Request and Transfer of Learners' School Records (text of DepEd Order No. 54, s. 2016)
- Commission on Higher Education — CHED Citizen's Charter 2025, 1st Edition (Certification of Student Records; eCAV)
- Department of Education — Philippine Educational Placement Test
- Philippine Daily Inquirer — School records of 7,300 destroyed by 'Yolanda'
