After the results of the second recruitment reserve were announced, placing 2,500 teachers, schools continue to search for teachers to fill 2,228 schedules submitted since Monday.
The count, made by Arlindo Ferreira, author of the education blog “Blog DeAr Lindo” and director of the Cego do Maio School Group in Póvoa de Varzim, includes only the schedules available in the school contract offer, the last available resource for teacher recruitment.
In addition to these, there may still be schedules from previous weeks’ school contract offers that have not yet been filled, as well as those that will be made available in the next recruitment reserve, whose results will be known on Monday.
Similar to previous years, schools have the greatest difficulty hiring for the subject of Computer Science, but the scenario is concerning in almost all recruitment groups, except for preschool and 1st cycle.
For Computer Science, for example, schools still have at least 126 empty schedules, but there are also 92 unfilled schedules for Portuguese, 83 for Mathematics teachers, 80 for Physics and Chemistry teachers, and 75 schedules for History and Geography.
“I think (the situation) is worse at the moment,” said the school director in comparison to last year.
According to the count made until 5:30 PM on Tuesday, the more than two thousand schedules translate to about 117,000 students without classes in at least one subject.
Classes start between September 12 and 16, in a new school year that the Minister of Education, Science, and Innovation has already admitted will begin with “thousands of students without classes.”
The government has approved a set of measures for this year to try to address the lack of teachers in schools, including the possibility of hiring retired teachers with extra remuneration or doctoral scholarship holders.
In addition to the “+ Classes + Success” plan, the government will create support for displaced teachers placed in schools where it is difficult to hire teachers and will conduct, during the first term, a new extraordinary binding competition for the most needy schools.
