The regulation comes as relief for educators across the archipelago who hope it will be a step toward ending religious intolerance and discrimination within the country’s educational institutions.

The joint decree, signed by Home Minister Tito Karnavian, Religious Affairs Minister Yaqut Cholil Qoumas and Education and Culture Minister Nadiem Makarim, lets public school students decide for themselves whether to wear religious attire or not.

“The key point […] is that the right to wear religious attire is the freedom of each individual and shouldn’t be enforced by the school,” Nadiem said on Wednesday. “Therefore, regional administrations or school managements should neither enforce nor ban students of public schools from wearing religious clothing.”

The government ordered public schools and local administrations across the country to revoke any regulations requiring or banning students from wearing religious attire as part of their uniform within 30 days of the issuance of the decree on Wednesday.

However, public schools in Aceh are exempted from the new policy. The province is the only region in Muslim-majority Indonesia to implement Islamic Law.

Nadiem went on to say that the government had prepared punishments for any officials and schools found violating the SKB, including by cutting the school operational assistance (BOS) funds. The Education and Culture Ministry had set up a hotline for people to report such violations.

The three ministers issued the joint decree shortly after public uproar surrounding a public vocational high school in Padang that requires all female students, including non-Muslims, to wear a hijab.

A video showing a parent of a non-Muslim student going to the school to protest the rule went viral on social media, sparking debate among Indonesian internet users.

While the school officials have apologized for the brouhaha, the provincial education agency said the school’s rule was in line with a 2005 city bylaw requiring all female students to wear a hijab while studying at schools in Padang.

Jakarta-based human rights group SETARA Institute said the case was not an isolated incident. The group recorded at least seven similar cases at schools in Riau, East Java and Yogyakarta between 2016 and 2018.

The group said such incidents occurred due to strong majoritarianism, a tendency from the majority group living in an area to view their dominant values as collective values. SETARA said the case in Padang might indicate a deeper problem of intolerance in the country.

Henny Supolo, the chairwoman of the Teachers' Light Foundation that focuses on improving teacher skills, appreciated the government’s decision to issue the SKB.

"This is evidence of the government's seriousness about ensuring that public schools serve as a place to nurture diversity, patriotism and humanity of the students," she told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

She noted that many regulations in public schools did not promote diversity and religious tolerance, despite the fact that such schools had students from various religious backgrounds. One example was a high school teacher in Jakarta discouraging students to vote for non-Muslim candidates for chair of the Student Executive Organization (OSIS).

Henny said such occurrence violated Article 4 Paragraph 1 of the 2003 National Education System Law that mandated that education be carried out in a nondiscriminatory manner by upholding religious values and national diversity, among other values.

Teachers have also expressed support for the joint ministerial regulation. Narito, the headmaster of state junior high school SMP 7 in East Jakarta, welcomed the decree as a legal framework to ban “arbitrary” rules in public schools.

"Public schools should educate and nurture students from various religious and ethnical backgrounds. Obliging them to wear certain religious attire is an arbitrary action that violates their human rights," Narito said.

Agustin Purwaningsih, a teacher from state senior high school SMA 1 Bambanglipuro in Bantul, Yogyakarta, echoed Narito’s sentiment: "I think this regulation could be a solution to solve religious intolerance in public schools, especially in regions where local administrations have issued discriminatory policies."