Minister admits start of school year will be marked by serious lack of teachers
Portugal’s minister of education, Fernando Alexandre, acknowledged this Friday that the new school year will start with “thousands of students without classes” – stressing that this is a “serious flaw” in public schools that the government wants to resolve by the end of the legislature.
Speaking to journalists in Barcelos, in Braga district, where he took part in a seminar to open the school year, Fernando Alexandre did not specify the number of students without a teacher at the start of the school year – scheduled between September 12 and 16, depending on the school – saying that the figures would be calculated only later.
He did say, however, that the teacher tender launched by the previous, Socialist government “didn’t solve the problem, it probably made it worse”.
“In other words, we still have thousands of students without classes and we are taking measures that, anticipating the problems we had, we started preparing as early as June. Yesterday (Thursday) we announced another measure and next week there will be more,” he said.
Considering that “it’s not acceptable that in 2024 there will be thousands of students without classes in Portugal,” the minister reiterated his commitment to reducing by 90% this year the number of students who did not have a teacher for at least one subject in the first term of the previous school year, that is 20,000.
In order to achieve this, and in addition to the measures taken by the government, the minister considered that head teachers will also have “an essential role to play” since “there is a significant dimension of the problem that results from management, whether it’s the organisation of timetables or the capacity of the school’s hiring staff.
“We can only do the maths at the end,” he stressed, saying that the government is working “every day to ensure that the school year runs as smoothly as possible” but emphasising that “a structural problem that has worsened over the last eight years cannot be solved overnight.”
Alexandre said that the terms under which the travelling allowance for teachers will be applied will be announced next week, as well as the terms of the extraordinary competition for schools where there are students without teachers.
“This is an innovation: in other words, we’re going to hold a tender for teachers for certain areas and we’re going to give them a subsidy,” he said.
The government is negotiating the terms of the tender and the support with the unions, and a new negotiating meeting is scheduled for Monday.
The minister also said that there are “a few hundred” retired teachers who have already “expressed an interest” in returning to teaching, thus also helping to solve the problem.
However, he warned that the problem of students without teachers will not be solved in a year.
“The government’s commitment is to resolve the problem of students without classes by the end of the legislature. This is a serious flaw in the public school system that we need to correct, but which in recent years has simply been ignored,” he said.
Source: LUSA
