From Zoning to Domicile: School Admission Reform and Educational Equity in Indonesia

Abstract

In February 2025 the Indonesian government replaced the regulation governing new student admission, substituting a new system for the zoning-based arrangement that had operated since 2017 and that had generated the largest category of complaints received by the national ombudsman in the education sector. The reform renames the process, replaces the zoning pathway with a domicile pathway assessed by measured distance rather than by residence documents, retains affirmative, achievement, and transfer pathways, and introduces a regional allocation mechanism for upper secondary schooling in subdistricts without state provision. This article aims to analyse the reform against the equity objective it claims to serve, to identify which of the problems attributed to zoning it addresses, and to assess whether admission policy is an appropriate instrument for the objective. The study is a qualitative policy analysis combining doctrinal reading of the successive regulations with synthesis of the school choice and educational equity literature; no field data were collected. The analysis finds that the shift from documentary residence to measured distance addresses manipulation effectively, that the regional allocation mechanism addresses a genuine coverage gap, and that neither addresses the generating condition of the controversy, which is the coexistence of unequal school quality with insufficient state school capacity. It concludes that admission reform can redistribute scarcity but cannot reduce it, and recommends that equity objectives be pursued primarily through supply-side instruments