In statements to journalists in Barcelos, Braga district, where he participated in a seminar for the opening of the school year, Fernando Alexandre did not specify the number of students without a teacher at the beginning of the academic year, stating that the calculations will be made later.
The government official said, however, that the teacher recruitment process launched by the previous government “did not solve the problem, it probably made it worse.”
“In other words, we continue to have thousands of students without classes, and we are taking measures that, anticipating the problems we had, we began to prepare in June. Yesterday we announced another measure, and next week there will be more measures,” he said.
Considering that “it is not acceptable that in 2024 there are thousands of students without classes in Portugal,” the official reiterated the commitment to reduce, this year, by 90 percent, the 20,000 students who did not have a teacher in at least one subject during the first term of the previous school year.
For this, and in addition to the measures taken by the government, the minister considered that school directors will also have “an essential role,” as “there is a significant dimension of the problem that results from management, whether in the organization of schedules or the hiring capacity of the schools themselves.”
“We can only do the math at the end,” he stressed, emphasizing that the government is working “every day so that the school year proceeds with the greatest possible normality,” but admitting that “a structural problem that has worsened over the last eight years cannot be solved overnight.”
Fernando Alexandre said that next week, the terms of the teacher relocation subsidy will be announced, as well as the terms of the extraordinary recruitment process for schools where there are students without teachers.
“This is an innovation, that is, we are going to conduct a teacher recruitment process for certain areas to hire teachers, and we are going to provide a subsidy,” he emphasized.
The government is negotiating the terms of the recruitment process and support with the unions, with a new negotiation meeting scheduled for Monday.
The minister also said that there are “a few hundred” retired teachers who have already “expressed interest” in returning to teaching, thus also helping to solve the problem.
However, he warned that the problem of students without teachers cannot be solved in one year.
“The government’s commitment is to solve the problem of students without classes by the end of the legislature. This is a serious failure of the public school system that we must correct, but which has simply been ignored in recent years,” he added.
