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There are more than 4,000 institutions with high disparity in terms of quality and infrastructure. The disparity is partly caused by Indonesia’s geography, as the country is spread across a very large archipelago. It has been very challenging for Ministry Of Education to try to reduce the disparity between the highly‐ranked and low ranked Indonesia Higher Education, while ensuring that the quality of leading HEIs can be maintained and further increased. However, the main cause of the failings is put down to leaders at national level and in Higher Education institutions not being able to focus on the changes necessary to deliver quality higher education (Rosser, 2018). Indeed, it is clear that there is a need to support leaders so that the necessary reforms to higher education in Indonesia are delivered.
This phenomenon has underpinned the key reforms of the Minister of Education and Culture. The reforms are focused on creating more flexibility and autonomy in an HEI’s management and administration, and the capacity building of the leaders to cope with that autonomy. This leads to another challenge related to the lack of financial and curriculum
flexibility in most of HEIs. Not only that, the limited number of university leaders who are competent to execute effective leadership also contributes to the failing system.
The level of commitment of leaders in HEIs to continuous improvement has also been a problematic issue. Until recently, only 96 universities out of almost 3000 HEIs are accredited A, and less than 10% of them could be considered international‐standard by well‐known international academic league tables such as QS World University Ranking. This explains why most of the HEIs are not ready to internationalise. It is believed that the lack of capacity of academic leaders in HEIs is key to the lack of progress on quality improvement.
The project will meet the need through the transfer, development and implementation of a formal leadership and management development framework and an associated leadership development network based around a programme of development. This programme will be tailored to the specific needs of higher education institutions, and their leadership and management staff, in Indonesia.
The Indonesian universities and the Ministry of Education and Culture (P9, MOE) wish to work in collaboration to develop a common framework and development network that can be used by all Indonesian higher education institutions. This program ensures that the leadership and management development opportunities developed through the project will be appropriate and of value for the full range of Indonesian HEIs. In turn, this will make sure that good leadership and management practices are distributed widely during the project as well as at the stage of dissemination.
This project will be the first opportunity for Indonesian universities have had to develop a Learning Management Development Network (LMDN) and Learning Management Development programme (LMDP) to meet the current change agenda in higher education. And finally, leadership national symposium will be held as the implementation of LMDN.