EDUCATION FOR EVERY ONE

Education officials in Papua’s Jayapura district have set a target of ensuring that all children enrolled in the sixth and ninth grades this year finish primary school or junior high school, in a province where up to a quarter of school-aged children don’t have access to education.

Alpius Toam, the head of the Jayapura Education Office, said on Saturday that the move was part of efforts to improve the quality of education in the district.

Papua province has one of the lowest school attendance rates in the country, with up to 15 percent of primary school-aged children and 25 percent of junior high school-aged children not going to school, according to the Central Statistics Agency (BPS). The figures were from 2012, the latest year for which statistics are available.

Alpius attributed the higher rate of attendance in junior high school on the large number of students dropping out because the poor quality of education they received at primary school left them unable to cope beyond sixth grade.

“We need to improve [the school system] so that a student can get a good education in primary school and continue on to junior high school with no problems,” he said as quoted by state news agency Antara.

He added his office had received multiple reports of students struggling in junior high school because they could barely read or write.

“This puts extra pressure on the educators and eventually affects the education process for all students, all because some students aren’t get a proper education in primary school,” Alpius said.

He added the push to get students to complete junior high school was also part of a campaign by the Education Ministry to ensure that all Indonesians finish at least the ninth grade.

Hardship posting

Part of the ministry’s wider efforts to improve the quality of education nationwide will focus on the introduction this year of a program in which candidate teachers must spend a year teaching in regions such as Papua and other underdeveloped or remote areas, in order to qualify for civil servant status.

Supriadi Rustad, the Education Ministry’s director responsible for teacher training, said last month that those that completed the program would get a “bachelor’s degree in teaching in frontier, outlying and underdeveloped regions,” or SM3T.

He said the program was initially conceived in 2011 to induce university graduates looking to become teachers to take a posting in so-called hardship areas, and although participants would get civil servant status at the end of their period, it was not at the time a requirement for attaining such status.

Among the inducements for getting young people to teach in remote areas is higher pay than in urban or developed areas.

“Since the advent of the SM3T program, regions that have long had a shortage of teachers because of their isolation are now seeing a gradual but definite increase in the quality of education,” Supriadi said.

“That’s why we’ve now decided to make this program mandatory for all candidate teachers.”

Civil servant status for teachers typically entitles the holder to a higher salary than non-tenure teachers, a range of benefits, and a guaranteed pension for life upon retirement.

Supriadi said some 2,400 people entered the SM3T program when it first rolled out in 2011. The following year, there were 2,600 new candidates, and last year the number of new entrants was up to 2,800.

All those taking part were graduates of the 12 nationwide campuses of the Indonesian Teaching Academy (LPTK).

Supriadi said some of the provinces where the candidate teachers were assigned included Papua, West Papua, East Nusa Tenggara, Aceh, Riau Islands and East Kalimantan.

“In Papua specifically, they were assigned to teach in the hinterland regions of Asmat, Paniai and Yahukimo,” he said.

One year of the new curriculum

In addition to the SM3T program, this year will also mark the completion of the first year of a controversial new curriculum introduced last year by the Education Ministry for primary schools.

The curriculum emphasizes a shift toward “softer” subjects like Islamic studies, civics and culture, at the expense of English, computers and science in some schools, which has been a focal point of critics, who argue that it risks churning out a generation of young people less capable than previous generations of competing on the global level.

The ministry, however, counters that the number of subjects that primary school students were learning needed to be distilled down to alleviate the pressure on students, and given a more local spin.

The ministry also says subjects such as English have not been scrapped completely, and that students who wish to study them can still do so after school hours.

For its first year of implementation, fewer than 6,400 out of more than 148,000 primary schools nationwide adopted the new syllabus, with the ministry saying it would take time to train all teachers on the new curriculum.

Mohammad Nuh, the education minister, said last month that his ministry was seeking to train some 1.3 million teachers this year, out of the nearly three million nati