Angry parents hit the lunchtime TV news headlines on Monday over extended school schedules at a primary school in Faro. The new schedules mean that some children as young as five have to start school at 7.50 in the morning and carry on until after 1pm, while others start at 1.20pm and finish at 6.40pm.
Over 100 parents gathered in front of Faro’s Alto Rodes primary school to object to the unpopular schedules, which have increased the week’s timetable from 22.5 hours to 25.
The changes came from the regional education board (DRE), which said it was “fulfilling the law imposed by the inspection authority for education” (IGEC).
But this now means that with the extra time spent in classrooms, and breaktime reduced from 30 to 20 minutes, children will be confined to their chairs for almost three hours in a row.
“What children of that age can keep their concentration at those levels,” questioned the president of the parents’ association of the school, Paula Coutinho. “It is not just about Portuguese and Maths. Children also need time to play.”
Parents are now waiting for a response from the Ministry of Education, which Paula Coutinho considers “the only entity capable of resolving the situation”.
This is not the only unrest among parents over education in the Algarve this year. Protests also took place in Alcoutim last week when mothers and fathers spoke out against the use of “containers” as their children’s classrooms.
The situation is described as temporary – while improvement work takes place on the school’s infrastructures – but parents, supported by their local mayor Osvaldo Gonçalves, feel the containers are unsafe.
