Helping to nourish RI's primary education

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.