Inclusive Education Policy in Indonesia: Regulatory Guarantees and Implementation Constraints

Abstract

Indonesia has constructed one of the more comprehensive legal frameworks for inclusive education in Southeast Asia, comprising a statutory right to education for persons with disabilities, a government regulation on reasonable accommodation for learners with disabilities, and ministerial provision for inclusive schooling, all following ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Persistent reports of exclusion nevertheless continue. This article aims to analyse the normative structure of the framework, to identify the legal and institutional mechanisms on which its implementation depends, and to explain the recurrent gap between guarantee and practice. The study is a normative and policy analysis combining doctrinal reading of the regulatory instruments with the conceptual apparatus of the social model of disability and the capability approach; no field data were collected. The analysis shows that Indonesian law has substantially completed the shift from an integration paradigm, in which access depends on a learner's capacity to cope with an unmodified school, to an accommodation paradigm, in which the obligation falls upon the institution; that the operative legal standard of reasonable accommodation is nevertheless implemented through mechanisms that treat accommodation as resource-dependent rather than as obligatory; and that specialist support teacher supply functions as the practical determinant of provision. It recommends that accommodation be made an accreditable standard rather than a discretionary provision, that specialist teacher supply be planned against enrolment rather than against school request, and that refusal of enrolment be given a determinate remedy