Challenges

The provinces of Papua and West Papua rank among the lowest in Indonesia across most human development indices. They are the provinces with the highest relative poverty, at 26.56 and 21.33 percent respectively, as of March 2022. In 2015, baseline data indicated that almost half of grade 2 and 3 students (48.5 per cent) in the two provinces were non-readers compared with 5.9 per cent nationally. The lengthy closure of schools and disrupted school reopenings due to the pandemic, took a heavy toll on Papuan children’s learning, as learning time in schools was missed, resulting in widespread learning loss on top of already weak learning outcomes.

Compared to other parts of the country, access to alternative digital or blended learning modalities is limited in Papua, and children are therefore likely to fall further behind. Key factors driving children’s poor learning outcomes are poorly trained teachers, teacher and principal absenteeism, insufficiently contextualized curricula, and education being undervalued by students and parents.

Toward a Solution

The Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Training of Indonesia (MoECRT), with the support of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Australia (DFAT), launched the Early Grade Literacy (EGL) programme in Papua and West Papua provinces, aiming to improve teachers’ skills and children’s reading and comprehension skills. Key strategies of the EGL programme include teacher capacity development through training and mentoring; the provision of contextualized learning materials; community mobilization and policy advocacy for scalability, through the prioritization of local government resources to promote sustainability.

Tailored instruction is a vital component of EGL, providing individualized support to marginalized children, an approach consistent with MoECRT’s Emancipated Learning reform agenda. To achieve SDG4 for inclusive quality education for all children in Indonesia, the EGL programme focuses on poor and lowest-performing learners in the early grades of primary school. The programme is designed to address key challenges to improving the quality and effectiveness of teaching and learning practices in the early grades by:

• improving teaching practices through the development of a structured pedagogy to teaching reading in early grades and providing intensive teacher training and mentoring;
• improving the learning environment for literacy through the development and provision of culturally relevant levelled children’s reading materials, to be available for children in classroom reading corners;
• enhancing community participation by engaging parents and local community members in activities and events that increase the demand for education and improved learning outcomes, and providing fora for the community to support children’s learning through reading;
• system strengthening for local governments to build capacities to plan and budget for the replication and scale-up of the programme, including through the enactment of local regulations governing planning and budgeting processes.

Following the success of the initial phase of the programme in six districts, UNICEF advocated for its expansion. As a result, four additional districts allocated budgets and initiated implementation of the programme. Furthermore, at national level, the Ministry of Home Affairs encouraged all districts in Indonesia to prioritize literacy though programmes such as the EGL programme. Some results from the EGL programme include:

• From 2015 to 2018, the proportion of non-readers in lower-performing schools decreased from 62 to 26 per cent, while the proportion of adequate readers increased from 6 to 18 per cent in target schools. This will be updated with endline data in early 2024.
• Approximately 27,221 students (49 per cent girls) — the majority indigenous Papuan —have benefitted from improved teaching and learning.
• Nearly 1,600 teachers and principals, many indigenous, have improved their ability to provide tailored instruction to their students to better support literacy.
• Eight pre-service institutions are engaged on integration of an EGL module with at least 30 student teachers in their teacher training programme or a total of 240 by the end of 2023. Many of these trained student teachers undertake their practice teaching in the schools supported by the programme.
• Seventy seven contextualized and levelled reading books were developed. These books come with EGL instruction guides, teaching materials and student worksheets.
• Increased use of non-violent classroom management practices among teachers, using positive discipline and child-centred pedagogy.

To scale up the EGL programme, UNICEF developed a roadmap with concrete milestones to be achieved at school, district and system levels using available resources. A series of capacity-building workshops were held among local governments in Papua and West Papua to assist with implementing the roadmap. To date, this work has yielded over $740,000 in committed local funds to replicate and scale-up the programme. Although a systematic cross-country transfer of the innovation is yet to happen, the programme has been recognized as a good model by UNICEF East Asia and Pacific Regional Office (EAPRO) and Headquarters, with the potential for further replication, through South-South and triangular cooperation in other countries facing similar challenges.

Some of the lessons learned from the initiative include:

• Tailoring instruction to the learning levels of students is an effective way to improve learning. The EGL programme helped teachers to teach at the right level, leading to significant gains in children’s reading skills.
• For the best learning outcomes, reading materials must be culturally relevant and age appropriate. Contextualized books are more compelling for teachers and students, and they encourage children to read.
• In rural and remote contexts, teachers need mentoring and detailed instructional materials to customize instruction and teach at the right level. In Papua, most teachers had never received literacy-focused pedagogy prior to EGL.
• Advocacy and contextualized support to each district are key to ensuring buy-in and longer-term sustainable implementation.
• Evidence generation through conducting baseline and endline student learning assessments is important to inform programme implementation, including key areas of focus. The research on good practices addressing teacher absenteeism has the potential to contribute to a policy to resolve a contributory cause of low learner performance.
• Leveraging other funding partner resources helped UNICEF expand the programme in three low-resourced districts outside Papua province.