PAUD Accreditation: Who Must Apply, and What BAN-PDM Checks

Does every PAUD have to be accredited?

Yes, and the obligation carries a deadline most operators only meet by accident. Pasal 8 ayat (2) of Permendikbudristek 38/2023 requires a new unit to lodge its first accreditation application with BAN no later than two years after it receives its izin pendirian. Pasal 8 ayat (3) closes the other door: a unit whose izin pendirian is already more than two years old and which holds no accreditation status is obliged to apply as well.

The scope in Pasal 3 ayat (2) is wider than the word PAUD suggests in everyday use. Taman Kanak-kanak, Raudhatul Athfal, Kelompok Bermain, Taman Penitipan Anak and Taman Kanak-kanak Luar Biasa are all named, along with other equivalent forms. A daycare that thinks of itself as childcare rather than as a school is inside the regulation on the same terms as a TK.

The outcome has only two values. Pasal 6 ayat (2) allows terakreditasi and tidak terakreditasi, and Pasal 7 ayat (2) splits the first into three peringkat, A, B and C. Terakreditasi at any peringkat means the unit meets the minimum criteria. There is no partial or provisional result to fall back on.

If you are still working through the licence itself, that comes first. Our guide to getting your PAUD operating licence covers the stage before this one, and the two-year clock starts on the day that licence is issued.

Two clocks run on your accreditation, and they are judged differently

Your first accreditation is judged by people. Pasal 9 ayat (2) puts an asesor on it, assessing four things: the application documents, the data held in data pokok pendidikan or the education management information system, the profil and rapor of the unit, and the findings of a field inspection. Someone reads your files and someone comes to your building.

Re-accreditation is judged by your data. Pasal 15 ayat (1) states plainly that Akreditasi Ulang is carried out through an automated mechanism, and ayat (2) defines that mechanism as monitoring and analysing your profil and rapor together with your data pokok pendidikan or EMIS record.

Ayat (3) says what the analysis decides, namely whether you receive an extension of terakreditasi status at the same peringkat. Pasal 16 places this in the final year of the five-year validity granted under Pasal 10 ayat (4).

Then there is ayat (5), which is the sentence worth pinning above the desk. A unit that does not have that data is assessed instead by an asesor through a field inspection.

Thin records do not produce a gentler process. They produce the harder one.

So the compliance task has moved. For a first accreditation you prepare for a day. For every renewal after it you maintain a record across five years, and the quality of that record decides whether a renewal is a desk exercise or a visit.

What does the instrument actually measure?

The instrument in force is set by Kepmendikbudristek Nomor 246/O/2024, ditetapkan in Jakarta on 19 June 2024. Its diktum KEDUA revokes Keputusan Menteri Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan Nomor 71/P/2021, the old perangkat akreditasi for PAUD and pendidikan nonformal, and declares it no longer in force. This matters because a large amount of the accreditation advice still circulating describes that revoked instrument.

Lampiran I sets out the PAUD instrument as three komponen holding fourteen numbered butir. Komponen 1, butir 1 to 4, covers kinerja pendidik dalam mengelola proses pembelajaran yang berpusat pada peserta didik.

Komponen 2, butir 5 to 9, covers kepemimpinan kepala satuan pendidikan dalam pengelolaan satuan pendidikan. Komponen 3, butir 10 to 14, covers iklim lingkungan belajar.

There is a detail in the same Kepmen that tells you what PAUD is being judged on and what it is not. The Sekolah Dasar instrument in Lampiran II has four komponen, because it adds kompetensi hasil pembelajaran lulusan dan peserta didik.

The PAUD instrument does not have that komponen. Nobody is scoring your children's learning outcomes. They are scoring how your educators teach, how the kepala satuan leads, and what the environment is like.

That shape shows up in the butir themselves. Butir 4 asks whether the educator facilitates learning that builds foundational capability across nilai agama dan moral, nilai Pancasila, fisik motorik, kognitif, bahasa and sosial emosional.

Butir 13 asks whether the unit ensures the safety of learners, educators and education staff. Butir 14 asks whether the unit supports the fulfilment of young children's essential needs. These are questions about ordinary practice on an ordinary day, not about a portfolio assembled the week before.

The stages, from sosialisasi to validasi

BAN-PDM published a Panduan Pelaksanaan Akreditasi PAUD Tahun 2024, signed by chair Totok Suprayitno in Jakarta in March 2024, which sets out how the process actually runs. The sequence is sosialisasi akreditasi, then pengisian instrumen Penilaian Prasyarat Akreditasi, then Klasifikasi Permohonan Akreditasi, then visitasi, then validasi dan verifikasi.

The application is lodged through Sispena, version 3.1. From the date the target list is socialised in your kabupaten or kota you have a maximum of one month to complete the PPA. The panduan also carries two instructions worth reading before you start rather than after: prepare each supporting document as a PDF of at most 2 MB, and update your Dapodik data.

One widely repeated claim about the KPA stage is wrong, and the panduan says so directly. KPA is described there as a function that analyses pre-visit data for the visiting asesor to triangulate, and explicitly not a mechanism for selecting which units pass or fail through to visitasi.

Every unit that has been through KPA continues to visitasi, without exception. Where a unit has not filled in the PPA at all, the asesor issues a recommendation of the minimum documents that unit needs to hold, and the process continues. You cannot be filtered out at KPA, and you also cannot skip the visit by leaving the form empty.

Visitasi runs for eight hours and is carried out by two asesor, one of whom is the same asesor who did the KPA on your unit. That continuity is deliberate, and it means the person walking your rooms has already read what you uploaded. The result then goes to validasi, where a validator checks the visitasi assessment, may not assess a unit they themselves visited, and handles at most seven PAUD units.

One source of confusion is worth naming. The PPA is scored against the eight standar, while the accreditation judgment itself runs on the three komponen and fourteen butir of Kepmen 246/O/2024. These are two different instruments at two different stages, not two versions of the same one, and blending them is where most of the conflicting advice online comes from.

What happens if the result is tidak terakreditasi?

It is a recoverable result, but it is not a quiet one and it does not stay open indefinitely. Under Pasal 12, BAN issues a rekomendasi perbaikan to a unit that receives tidak terakreditasi status, and that recommendation is copied to the local government and the ministry. Your dinas learns the outcome at the same time you do, and Pasal 12 ayat (4) makes the same document the basis on which the pemerintah daerah conducts pembinaan.

Pasal 13 ayat (1) sets the clock: you apply again no later than two years from the date the tidak terakreditasi status was set. The same two-year window applies under Pasal 22 ayat (1) where the status came out of a re-accreditation rather than a first one.

Pasal 14 is the part rarely quoted, and operators should read it before assuming a second attempt is a formality. Where a unit still receives tidak terakreditasi on that re-assessment, BAN reports the result to the local government and the ministry, and that report is used by them to merge or close the unit. Pasal 22 ayat (3) and ayat (4) carry the identical consequence through the re-accreditation route.

A first failure buys you a defined window and a written list of what to fix. A second one hands a decision about your unit's existence to someone else.

Losing a status you already hold

A five-year validity is not five years of immunity, and the grounds for taking it back are narrower and sharper than most operators expect. Pasal 11 lets BAN revoke accreditation status and peringkat before the validity period ends on two grounds.

The first is that the unit is proven to have given untrue data or information to the Kementerian, to the ministry handling religious affairs, or to BAN. The second is that a case occurs endangering the security and safety of people at the unit, caused by a failure in delivering the education service. Pasal 20 carries the identical grounds across to re-accreditation.

Read the first ground next to Pasal 15 and it becomes an operational rule rather than a legal abstraction. Your renewal is decided by analysing data you supplied.

That same data, if untrue, is a revocation ground. The incentive to round a number up in Dapodik and the consequence of doing it sit in the same regulation.

Pasal 17 supplies the timing. Where a decline in quality is suspected on the basis of data monitoring, a public complaint, or other accountable information, BAN may assign an asesor to assess through a field inspection, and ayat (2) states that inspection may be carried out at any time.

Note the asymmetry against Pasal 18, which handles suspected improvement, can be triggered by a proposal from the unit itself, and is limited to the final year of the validity period. Bad news can arrive on any day of the five years. Good news is looked at once, at the end.

A parent complaint is therefore not only a customer-service matter. Pasal 17 names pengaduan masyarakat as a trigger for an unscheduled inspection.

What should you keep between the visits?

The honest answer is the ordinary operational record, kept truthfully, all year, in a form someone else can check. Start with what the regulation is actually reading.

Pasal 15 runs on your profil and rapor and your Dapodik record. Those are national systems, and what you assert in them should be reconcilable against something you hold. If your Dapodik enrolment count and your own register disagree, the version that reaches BAN is the one you typed, and Pasal 11 makes an untrue version a revocation ground.

Then look at what the butir ask about. Butir 13 is about ensuring the safety of learners and staff, and butir 14 about supporting children's essential needs.

Neither is answered by a policy document alone. They are answered by whether the day actually ran that way, which is a record question. Knowing which children and which adults were in the building, on which day, is the base layer under both.

This is the part attendance records and enrolment records exist for, together with child profiles holding medical notes and emergency contacts, and a record of what you told parents and when. Kept in one place they give you something to check your own Dapodik assertion against, and something more durable than memory when an asesor arrives on a day you did not schedule.

Be clear about what software does not do here, because the claim is commonly made and it is not true. Happy Kamper does not connect to Sispena, Dapodik or EMIS, does not lodge or track an accreditation application, and does not export reports in official government formats.

Nothing you buy can produce a peringkat. The fourteen butir are about teaching, leadership and the climate of your rooms, and no system supplies those.

What a system supplies is the underlying record, so that when you are asked what happened, you are describing your data rather than reconstructing it. For how this fits the wider running of a centre, see our early education and daycare overview, and the separate question of BOP PAUD funding, which runs on the same Dapodik record but answers to a different rulebook.

Key Takeaways

Accreditation is compulsory and timed. Pasal 8 gives a new unit two years from its izin pendirian to apply, and a unit already past that mark with no status is obliged to apply now.

TK, RA, Kelompok Bermain, Taman Penitipan Anak and TKLB are all in scope. The result is terakreditasi at peringkat A, B or C, valid five years, or tidak terakreditasi.

The first accreditation is judged by an asesor across four sources including a field visit. Every renewal after it is judged by an automated analysis of your Dapodik and rapor data in the final year of validity, and a unit without that data gets a field inspection instead. Keeping the record is now the preparation.

The instrument is Kepmen 246/O/2024, three komponen and fourteen butir, and it revoked the old 71/P/2021 perangkat that much online advice still describes. The PPA prerequisite is scored against the eight standar and is a separate thing. KPA filters nobody out.

A tidak terakreditasi result gives you two years to re-apply and a written recommendation; a second one is reported to the pemda and used to merge or close the unit. A held status can be revoked at any time for untrue data or for a safety case, and a public complaint alone is enough to bring an asesor to the door unannounced.