Indonesian students benefit from child-friendly education practices

Firliani Purwanti from the New Zealand Embassy in Jakarta with students in Maluku

A children-friendly educational initiative undertaken by Save the Children and supported by New Zealand has borne fruit with national exam grades (Ujian Nasional) improving, and reports of violence reducing, as 75 schools in Ambon, central Maluku and West Seram take on board a programme to adopt positive discipline and child-friendly education practices in the classroom.

The 2010-2012 programme called SEQUEL, or “Sustainable Education Quality through Empowering Local Actors in Maluku”, is helping schools to provide its students with quality child-friendly education, said Firliani Purwanti, New Zealand Aid’s Senior Development Programme Coordinator at the New Zealand Embassy in Jakarta. Ms Purwanti got to see first-hand the positive benefits the programme has made to students when she visited two of the participating schools at SD Negeri 41 Ambon and SD Negeri Soahuku, Amahai, Central Maluku.

To help foster children-friendly education, Save the Children has been running a series of capacity building programmes throughout 2010-2012 for teachers, including school principals, school supervisors, and educational councils, to help them provide active teaching learning and positive discipline in the class room.

As least 44 educational supervisors have been trained, three of whom have gained “master trainers quality”.

New Zealand Aid Programme supported The SEQUEL project with total amount of IDR 11,269,217,950 or around NZ$ 1.5m.