This policy brief outlines three strategies that the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology (MoECRT) can implement to ensure teacher colleges, as teacher education providers, improve the quality of their graduates.
Tackling Indonesia’s teacher quality is a tangible way to lift the country’s learning profile. Policies to improve teacher performance range from increasing teachers’ wages, instituting certification programmes to better teacher readiness, deepening community participation in school management, and expanding pre-service teacher training as well as bridging experienced teachers with inexperienced teachers for ongoing development.
Highly varied learning facilities and support from parents among students, even in a class taught by the same teacher, leads to equally varied practices of learning from home. This widens even further learning inequalities among students. Students with limited support receive the worst impacts of the school closure policy.
Simulations show that school closures due to COVID-19 may result in worse learning losses than those accumulated during regular school breaks. This loss of schooling can have long-term effects on wages. All students face a high risk of scarring.
In some regions in Indonesia, efforts to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic have been followed by the distance learning policy. As a result, teachers and students are required to be able to adapt to changes in the teaching-learning process. In practice, however, the implementation of the policy varies greatly and is influenced by many different factors.