Realising the Right to Inclusive Education in Indonesia: Legal Guarantees and Remedial Deficits

Abstract

Indonesia has constructed a comprehensive legal framework guaranteeing inclusive education while producing a persistent gap between entitlement and realisation, a gap usually attributed to resource constraints and teacher attitudes rather than to the structure of the framework itself. This study aims to examine how Indonesian instruments construct the right to inclusive education relative to the international standard, to identify the features of the domestic framework that account for weak realisation, and to formulate the legal and institutional reconstruction required. The research applies normative juridical method combining statutory, conceptual, and comparative approaches, analysing the Constitution, the National Education System Law, the ratifying law and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the Disability Law, the regulation on reasonable accommodation, and the inclusive education regulation, read against the authoritative treaty interpretation and scholarship in disability studies, capability theory, and inclusive pedagogy. The findings show that the framework maintains a dual architecture in which segregated referral operates as the lower-burden institutional default; that reasonable accommodation is constructed as an institutional duty without a correlative individual right, a determination procedure, or a defined limit; and that the absence of an accessible remedy prevents both individual redress and the accumulation of guiding doctrine, shifting the cost of non-compliance onto families. The article recommends anticipatory curricular design, a defined determination procedure with written reasons, an accessible district-level remedy, funding attached to learners, and reconstitution of special institutions as resource centres.