Indonesian students have lagged behind their global peers since before the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the risk of significant loss and permanence of the phenomenon in low- and middle-income countries, along with the particularly lengthy period of school closure in Indonesia, this paper aims to give an insight into the discussion on student learning progress during school closures. We will present the impact of the closures on primary school students’ achievement in Bukittinggi, the third-largest city on the island of Sumatra and a highly urbanised area. The city has consistently performed well in most education-related measures due to a strong cultural emphasis on education and a supportive government (Nihayah et al., 2020), but has been significantly affected during the pandemic as most students are confined to their homes with very limited teacher-student interaction.

Selecting good teachers is vital as it can lead to a pool of teachers who will continuously strive to improve their teaching quality. Therefore, strengthening the assessment tools for screening effective teachers at their point of entry into the profession is important to improving teaching quality. While abundant studies have been conducted on improving teacher screening strategies in developed countries, only few have examined the process in the contexts of developing countries. Our study aims to enrich the literature on improving teacher screening in developing countries by testing sixty-two teachers using a set of teacher assessment instruments that measure both cognitive and non-cognitive skills. We discovered a significant and positive correlation between teacher competence in numeracy and student numeracy achievement. Furthermore, assessing teaching practices using a lesson demonstration is positively associated with students’ achievement. However, we found a significant but negative relationship between teacher competence in literacy and student literacy outcomes. We also reported a similar pattern in the correlation between teachers’ portfolio assessments and students’ learning outcomes. The negative correlation in literacy measurements may be explained by the difficulties experienced by teachers in Indonesia in translating their knowledge into practice, as there are no specific subjects designated to Indonesian language and reading comprehension. From a policy perspective, the government and education institutions can strengthen their teacher recruitment mechanisms by adopting instruments that can predict teacher effectiveness. Furthermore, these screening instruments should be combined with ex-post assessment tools as those assessments will provide a comprehensive overview of teacher capabilities, not only in terms of prospective teacher characteristics but also in terms of their actual classroom teaching performance after a certain period of teaching practice.