With roughly 55 million students, 3 million teachers and more than 236,000 schools in 500 districts, Indonesia has the world’s fourth-largest education system. But the system doesn’t work nearly as well as it should. The country’s new president Joko Widodo, generally known as Jokowi, hopes to change that with help from his new education secretary, Anies Baswedan, a former university president and creator of a programme which sends graduates to teach in remote areas.
Since the 1970s, Indonesia (pop.250 million) has boosted primary and junior-secondary enrolment rates dramatically. In the past decade, it has narrowed the gap in school-completion rates between rich and poor students, and between children in rural and urban areas. Since 2009, it has allocated a fifth of its annual budget to education. Yet gains in education have a lot more scope. Whereas primary-enrolment rates in richer districts are close to 100 percent, in some poor districts they remain below 60 percent. Nor are teachers evenly distributed. Across the system, enrolment declines markedly with age. Baswedan says Indonesia has 170,000 primary schools, 40,000 junior-secondary schools and just 26,000 high schools.
Boosting education quality, particularly relative to Indonesia’s neighbours, has been hard. Though average reading and maths scores on standardised PISA tests have improved since 2000, scores in science have declined — and scores in maths and reading have recently been slipping again. In the tests, Indonesia markedly lags behind not just rich Singapore, but also Vietnam, whose GDP per capita is three-fifths its own.
Baswedan wants to start by improving the teachers. He believes they should be evaluated not only on how many hours a week they teach, but on how well their students perform. Almost certainly, teachers need better training. Of more than 400 teacher-training institutes in Indonesia, Baswedan reckons that no more than a tenth are much good. The minister also wants to improve Indonesia’s vocational training institutes, particularly those in agriculture and fisheries, as a way both to boost the country’s skilled-manufacturing workforce and to help those in rural areas dependent on farming and the sea.
In the presidential race last year, Jokowi campaigned heavily on education. He wasted no time on one of his campaign promises, launching the Indonesia Smart Card in November. It provides school fees and stipends to 24 million poor students across Indonesia, guaranteeing them 12 years of free education. But the scheme’s value will depend on how well Baswedan can make his longer-term reforms work. Just stuffing more students into bad schools will be of little help.