Friendly to whom? Reconciling child-friendly school policy with Catholic educational identity in Indonesia

Indonesia's Child-Friendly School (Sekolah Ramah Anak, SRA) policy obliges every school, regardless of religious affiliation, to guarantee non-discrimination among staff and students. Catholic magisterial teaching on schooling obliges Catholic schools to secure a predominance of practising Catholic staff so that institutional identity can be transmitted. This article asks how these two obligations can be reconciled, and what the difficulty of reconciling them reveals about the limits of a universal child-friendliness. It develops a hybrid critical policy discourse analysis and integrative review, reading seven Indonesian state instruments against seven Catholic magisterial and diocesan texts, including the 2022 Instruction The Identity of the Catholic School for a Culture of Dialogue, and situating both against Indonesian implementation studies and the published record of International Studies in Catholic Education. It uses a doctoral case study of a secular multi-faith Indonesian school as a comparison case that shows what SRA implementation looks like when confessional-identity claims are absent. The analysis finds that Indonesian SRA policy is silent on religious-institution staffing altogether, while Catholic magisterial texts treat civil non-discrimination law as a constraint to be lawfully worked around rather than a value to be embraced, producing a durable, unacknowledged tension the article calls conditional hospitality.