Teacher Recruitment and Deployment

RISE Indonesia has shown that high-quality evidence, participatory engagements with policymakers, and a focus on real-world problem solving can bring about reform. The challenge now is to match the scale of the problem to how we can apply these methods to a still developing country with three time zones and speaks 762 languages. We’re on the right track, but we’re not there yet.  

The system is massive, with 3 million teachers and 69 million students at primary and secondary levels. It is highly decentralized, meaning that 500+ local governments can autonomously set their own education policies. And without specific recovery policies, the significant learning loss due to prolonged school closures will likely worsen the learning crisis. We intend to continue working with policymakers on these issues, together with any global partners who share the same concerns. 

Ms Rina is a primary school teacher in Indonesia. There are hundreds of thousands of teachers like Ms Rina, who began their careers with uncertainty in recruitment and employment status. With such an unclear career path, how does it affect the quality of teachers?

Welcome to “Reform Unreformed”, a collaboration of Papan Tulis podcast and RISE Program in Indonesia. In “Reform Unreformed”, RISE researchers will discuss areas in the Indonesian education system that need to be reformed to improve student learning.

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.

Teacher plays a role in the learning process, yet Indonesia's teachers have been generally underperforming. To find the root causes of the struggle to recruit good teachers in Indonesia, RISE Programme in Indonesia conducted a study that examined the teacher recruitment process.

Why is it so hard for Indonesia to recruit good teachers? We argue that the struggle to recruit good teachers are due to institutional, political economy, and social dynamics of the recruitment process. We will discuss three factors that underpin this issue.