WorkWB Bahasa Indonesia Contact

For school managers ยท October 2026

Teacher, data operator, treasurer: three jobs in one person

In many Indonesian preschools, the person who teaches in the morning is the person who fills in Dapodik, the national education database, and keeps the accounts at night. Here is how to measure that load in your own school.

In December 2023 a preschool teacher in Kediri, Dyah Puspita Sari, wrote in Mojok that she was responsible for "all class administration, school finances and Dapodik work". She often took work home and stayed up late to meet deadlines from the education office. Her piece is one person's experience, but managers of small preschools will recognise the pattern.

The problem has been acknowledged for years

In April 2020 President Joko Widodo told a cabinet meeting that teachers "are not focused on teaching and learning, and are used more for things related to administration". Five years later, on National Teachers' Day 2025, education minister Abdul Mu'ti was still promising the same thing: "Teachers' administrative tasks will be reduced."

National policy governs what teachers owe the state. It does not touch the work a school creates for itself: duplicate books, recaps typed out again, files only one person understands. You can fix that part without waiting for anyone.

An example from England: limit first, then tidy

In 2018 the teacher workload advisory group in England published a report called Making Data Work. One of its recommendations was that schools should have no more than two or three data collection points in a school year. The Department for Education and Ofsted, the school inspectorate, accepted all of its recommendations.

Schools in Indonesia have different reporting duties, so the number cannot simply be copied. The order of the questions can. Ask first whether a piece of data needs to be collected at all, and only then how to collect it faster.

Measure it yourself in one week

We did not find an official figure for the admin hours of preschool teachers in Indonesia. The most useful figure is your own school's, and it is simple to get.

  1. Write down every place a child's name is recorded, from the enrolment form to the progress report.
  2. Mark which records are retyped from another record.
  3. For one week, ask each teacher to note the minutes spent on each admin task.
  4. Add up the minutes per task and sort from the largest.

Start with the task at the top of that list. If you would like to read the list with someone, our first 30-minute consultation is free.

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