Helping to nourish RI's primary education

Elisabeth Klaver is project manager of the assistance team for the research component of the Primary Education Quality Improvement Project (PEQIP). With her team, she assists a Central Project Management Unit in the Direktorat Pendidikan Dasar (Directorate of Primary Education) in Jakarta.

As such, she has the overall technical and financial responsibility for this component.

In close cooperation with the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Indonesian researchers of her counterpart, PT. Mitra Lingkungan Dinamika and Professor Creemers of the University of Groningen, the research plan for this project was developed. This plan will be executed together with the consultant of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fr Technische Zusammenarbeit and the British Council.

These organizations are responsible for the assistance of quality improvement activities such as teacher professional development, management training, evaluation and monitoring and curriculum development.

Klaver is employed by DHV Consultants BV, an independent Dutch Consultancy firm which has had an office in Jakarta for more than twenty years. The firm has executed projects in a wide range of sectors. The expertise which it originally gained in an engineering context became more and more supplemented by knowledge and experience in the field of institutional and human resources development. Education has now become an important field of interest for DHV Consultants. DHV has established a series of working relationships with several European and Dutch universities and institutes for international education on education projects.

For loan projects, DHV is cooperating with the Netherlands organization for international cooperation in higher education known as NUFFIC.

Since joining with DHV, Elisabeth Klaver has been involved in education projects worldwide. She arrived in Indonesia in April of this year. The PEQIP Project started in August 1992 with training activities and data collection. The project is concentrating its activities in six Indonesian provinces: Aceh, West Sumatra, Yogyakarta, North Sulawesi, Bali and East Nusa Tenggara. These provinces have not yet profited from previous innovations and it is expected that the outcome of this project will be disseminated to other areas in a later phase.

For this project, the government of Indonesia and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development have concluded a loan agreement.

The main objective of PEQIP is to introduce policies and a mechanism to improve the quality of primary education in Indonesia.

An important organizational unit for the project is the Gugus Sekolah (school affiliation). The core school of this gugus serves as a resource center for the nearby satellite schools (SD IMBAS).

During recent site visits, Klaver was very impressed by the enthusiasm and the motivation of the teachers to get the utmost out of the newly provided equipment and the material to the PEQIP schools.

The total number of schools involved in the project is 432, involving 3,423 teachers and 77,857 students.

According to the National Teachers Association, there are about 1,116,000 elementary school teachers in Indonesia and 26 million primary school students. Most of the students are registered in public schools, Sekolah Dasar or Sekolah Dasar Inpres. The last are elementary schools built under the Presidential Decree in line with the country's compulsory education program.

The school system now reaches into remote areas and the population has access to primary and secondary education. The government has created over five million new primary school seats under the INPRES school construction programs. Indonesia is close to reaching near universal enrollment at primary level.

In the course of the expansion period, the infrastructure, such as buildings, are developed and the number of teachers significantly increased. However, together with these enormous efforts and the successes of the program, shortcomings also became visible. It was for this reason that the government's Five-Year Plan set goals that are concerned with improving education, particularly on the primary school level.

In the project, there's a strong awareness that the quality of education is in the hands of the teachers. The project is very concerned about the decisions teachers have to make day by day in their classrooms. Theory development and empirical research can be innovative and supporting tools of great value, especially when they focus on the relationship between all the factors of the various educational levels in the school system, taking classroom activities as the core process.

To put it differently, as a plant that only grows when a combination of factors like light, water, soil and care are optimized, likewise a child can only develop when a combination of factors are optimized in his or her learning surroundings. Theory development and empirical research can contribute to that awareness.