At the time of the review team’s vi

At the time of the review team’s visit, Indonesian teachers were being
asked to implement a new curriculum that was developed in 2013. The
new curriculum aims to improve the quality of instruction in schools and madrasah throughout Indonesia. Providing the right support to help teachers
and leaders to change their practice will be critical in achieving a lift in
teaching quality and student outcomes.
Teachers told the review team that the support they needed to help them
achieve better results was more training in content, interactive teaching
methods and thematic approaches to teaching the curriculum. To date few
teachers have received training on how to apply the 2013 curriculum in
their classrooms. If teachers try to implement new practices without fully
understanding what they entail, they could feel overwhelmed and the result
could be poorer instruction. Indonesia’s national curriculum is developed
at central level and MOEC has also been developing textbooks at national
level since 2013. This arrangement has allowed the government to rapidly
introduce a new direction for learning while at the same time providing
coherence across a vast country. Despite the advantages of consistency
and operational efficiency offered by centralised control of the curriculum,
the curriculum reform of 2013 is facing a number of challenges. If the new
curriculum is to make a difference to student outcomes, then its intent needs
to be fully understood at school level. Although the curriculum is developed
and disseminated centrally, teachers are trained, monitored and supported at
the district level. This creates a challenge in ensuring the national curriculum
is well understood and used by teachers and that they also understand the
extent to which they can adapt the curriculum to ensure it is relevant to their
local context.