Tackling Indonesia’s teacher quality is a tangible way to lift the country’s learning profile. Policies to improve teacher performance range from increasing teachers’ wages, instituting certification programmes to better teacher readiness, deepening community participation in school management, and expanding pre-service teacher training as well as bridging experienced teachers with inexperienced teachers for ongoing development.

Yet, regardless of the performance of these policies, they are quotidian by nature. The Ministry of Education and Culture’s (MoEC) reliance on improving efficiency or mentoring channels do not address the underlying problem of the quality teaching—i.e. how does MoEC ensure that Indonesia’s teachers are selected and recruited for the right reasons?

Teachers are currently hired by top-down civil servant recruitment process. As a result, teaching quality is not prioritised in the recruitment process because teachers are assessed as civil servants rather than as professional educators. This brief will therefore assess three strategies MoEC may take to ensure that local governments lead the teacher recruitment process so that teachers are selected and recruited for their teaching excellence to serve local needs.

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This policy note is based on the RISE Programme in Indonesia’s working paper, “The Struggle to Recruit Good Teachers in Indonesia: Institutional and Social Dysfunctions”.