Half a hundred teachers demonstrated today to demand that the government review the rules on mobility due to illness and analyze concrete cases such as that of Fernando, who had vocal cord cancer.
Fernando Gonçalves, a Visual Arts teacher, was present today at the protest outside the Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation (MECI), in Lisbon, called by the National Teachers’ Federation (Fenprof) to challenge the decision of the government to postpone the start of negotiations for the revision of the sickness mobility scheme (MpD) until September, delaying the entry into force of any changes.
A visual arts teacher for almost three decades, Fernando Gonçalves discovered cancer in his vocal cords in 2016. He told Lusa that the cancer had robbed him of his voice and his ability to teach a class.
The teacher’s situation worsened in 2022, when the new MpD rules ended the right of teachers to take time off from teaching in the event of illness, explained Francisco Gonçalves, deputy general secretary of Fenprof.
“Since then I’ve been dependent on the goodwill and sensitivity of principals not to assign me classes. Fortunately, I’ve been lucky and I’m left to co-teach,” the teacher from a school in Valadares, Gaia, who made the journey to Lisbon today to demonstrate “the injustices of the diploma”, told Lusa.
This is one of the points of the MpD criticized by the unions, who are demanding that the new ministerial team urgently review the system.
“What they’re doing is inhumane and unacceptable,” accused Fenprof’s general secretary, Mário Nogueira, after reading a motion that was unanimously approved and demands that the revision of the diploma be “a priority and take effect this school year”.
While negotiations are ongoing, the teachers are asking for concrete cases, such as Fernando’s, to be analyzed.
One of Fenprof’s demands is for schools to be able to authorize time off from teaching for all teachers who don’t have the health conditions to teach.
Francisco Gonçalves gave examples of other “dramatic cases”, such as that of a teacher in Viseu who takes care of her brother, but is excluded from the diploma, since it only provides for cases in which informal caregivers are the spouse or relatives in the ascending or descending line.
In June, the MECI presented a proposal that would reduce the distance between the teacher’s residence or place of care and the school where they are assigned from 50 to 40 kilometers and the minimum distance between their current school and the one they want to transfer to from 20 to 15 kilometers.
For Mário Nogueira, the government’s proposal was “worse than the previous one, because it kept what was bad and made some aspects worse”, reducing the chances of getting a transfer because it reduced the radius within which host schools could be located.
Mário Nogueira also criticized the criterion that stipulated that the host school had to have eight teaching hours to receive the teacher and increased the minimum hours to be considered for a vacancy from 6 to 8 hours.
As for the vacancies, it proposed that they should be a maximum of 10% of the number of teachers on the staff of each school/grouping, while the current system considers this percentage to be a minimum, adds Fenprof.
