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ndonesian students are performing below their counterparts in other countries because their teachers are not equipped with the skills to help them develop, a study says.

In a new review on the country'€™s education policies, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) says that the poor quality of teachers in Indonesia is the main reason behind Indonesia'€™s poor education.

Although OECD secretary-general Angel Gurria praised Indonesia for nearly achieving universal education in the past decade, student performance was three years behind the global average.

'€œThis is a very serious and very shocking statistic and the [Culture and Elementary and Secondary Education Ministry] will have to face this formidable challenge. Such low skill level is clearly holding back progress,'€ he said at the release of the OECD'€™s first review on Wednesday.

In the OECD review, the gross enrollment ratio for elementary schools in 2004 was 100 percent and increased drastically to 110.68 percent in 2013 and 2014. Meanwhile, the gross enrolment ratio for secondary education increased drastically from 76.1 percent in 2001 to 96.9 percent in 2013.

However, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) said that Indonesia finished second-lowest out of the 65 countries participating in its 2012 assessment.

Organized by the OECD since 2000, PISA is a triennial assessment designed to compare the quality of international education by testing the performance of 15-year-old students in reading, mathematics and science. In 2012, PISA'€™s assessment involved more than 510,000 students worldwide, including Indonesia.

'€œThis means the 50 percent of Indonesia'€™s 15 year olds do not have the basic skills of mathematics; imagine, the average child in Indonesia compared to the global standard seems to have three years less of schooling,'€ he said.

The review noted that the number of teachers was not the problem as many have speculated before; 54 percent of schools reported a shortage of teachers in 2003 while only 16 percent of schools reported shortages in 2012.

In the 2012-2013 academic year, there were a total of 2.7 million civil servant and non-civil servant teachers nationwide.

Although the OECD review pinpoints the rather low bar for teachers to become accredited due to the almost 100 percent passing rate, OECD rapporteur Michael Gallagher said that the problem was also in the way teachers assist in classrooms.

'€œDidactic teaching rather than interactive learning is embedded in much of the culture. There is also a major disconnect between what is happening in schools and what teachers were taught in teaching colleges,'€ he said.

Gallagher recommended that teachers and principal should be encouraged to share what works in the classroom so that educators nationwide could learn from each other.

Furthermore, he recommended that the Culture and Elementary and Secondary Education Ministry focus on improving the quality of educators in early childhood education first as doing so would create a domino effect on the following levels of education.

Separately, Culture and Elementary and Secondary Education Minister Anies Baswedan applauded the OECD'€™s research efforts and said that much improvement needed to be made in the next five years.

'€œWe will try to focus on early childhood education, which is often overlooked. Many problems persist today because we had overlooked them,'€ Anies said.