Pedro Nuno Santos believes this is a solution to State schools’ teacher shortages
Campaigning PS leader Pedro Nuno Santos has come up with another solution to deep-seated problems within the public sector.
Talking to a packed room in Coimbra yesterday, he said he wants to encourage retired teachers back into the classroom “in order to respond to the current needs of public schools”.
“As long as we can’t get the teachers we need, we’re going to encourage those who have already retired to teach so that we can try to meet the needs our schools have today,” he said.
This is a similar solution to the one Mr Santos has for the chronic lack of doctors, writes Lusa.
In his speech, Pedro Nuno Santos argued that education should continue to be “a renewed passion for the PS”, considering that this is where “equality between men and women, between Portuguese people” is at stake.
“It also starts with those who dedicate themselves to a teaching career, and we want to value, dignify and respect those who dedicate their lives to teaching others. It’s fundamental for us to have teachers who feel motivated and respected in Portugal,” he went on.
“It’s like that in any profession: we do our job better in any profession when we feel valued, respected”.
At the same time, the PS leader also said he wants teaching to be more attractive, in order to ensure young people look at the career “as a career for the future”.
“That’s why we want to increase the pay rates at entry level, to enhance the career, to have a more attractive career, so that more young people want to give their lives to teaching our children, our children, our grandchildren”.
It may have been the right speech for a rally of party faithful, but it did not impress Mário Nogueira, the secretary-general of FENPROF, the federation of Portuguese teachers.
Mário Nogueira stressed that the country has enormous numbers of teachers retiring. “It’s unlikely that they will want to come back.
“Last year we had just over a thousand young people coming into teaching and we had 3,521 teachers retiring. In the first quarter of this year alone we beat the millennium record, which was set in 2013, and by the end of March we’ll have 1,048 teachers retiring”.
Trying to lure exhausted teachers back after a lifetime of service is “not a solution, the solution is something else: valuing the teaching profession”, said Nogueira.
Speaking to journalists on the sidelines of a communist rally also held in Coimbra yesterday, the union leader warned that there are already “more than 42,000” children without their full complement of teachers, while aging professionals in schools is one of the profession’s most serious problems.
“What the next government will have to do – and this is its challenge – is to first attract the 20,000 young teachers who have left the profession and who are qualified. And that can only be achieved by offering better conditions”, he said.
Source material: LUSA
