Learning Beyond Barriers: Learners' Academic Experiences in Alternative Learning System

Despite free public education in the Philippines, many Filipinos remain unable to attend school due to poverty, early pregnancy, family dysfunction, geographic isolation, and institutional barriers. The Alternative Learning System (ALS) emerged as a pathway for these marginalized learners, yet a comprehensive synthesis of their academic experiences across diverse populations and contexts remains absent in the literature. This qualitative meta-synthesis addresses that gap by integrating findings from eleven peer-reviewed studies on ALS learners' academic experiences at the secondary level, published between 2021 and 2025. Using Noblit and Hare's (1988) [17] meta-ethnographic framework and the CASP Qualitative Checklist, the study produced one unifying meta-theme — Resilience Amid Barriers — and three overarching themes: (1) Navigating Structural and Personal Adversity; (2) The Transformative Power of Flexible Pedagogy; and (3) The Role of Support Systems in Sustaining Academic Engagement. From these patterns, the Resilient Recovery Framework emerged, proposing that ALS functions best as a humanized recovery ecosystem where survival, re-entry, and transformative agency work together to make learning sustainable.