Schools received 380 new enrolments in the space of just one week, according to Education Minister Fernando Alexandre. Of those pupils, 73% are foreign nationals.

The figures were revealed during a parliamentary hearing on the shortage of school places, after hundreds of children began the academic year still waiting to be placed in a public school.

For the minister, the latest numbers help explain why finding a place for every child is not something that can simply be completed before the first day of classes.

New applications continue to arrive

Some involve families who have recently moved to Portugal, while in other cases the children are not yet in the country.

Alexandre said this can create another complication for schools. Places may be allocated to children who then never take them up.

Each case, he said, is being dealt with individually.

The minister rejected the suggestion that the continued difficulties mean the system is failing, arguing that late enrolments are not a new phenomenon and have occurred in previous years.

Schools given more freedom over places

There has, however, been a change in the way places are managed this year.

Previously, the former Directorate-General for Schools (DGEstE) helped determine how many classes each school could open, with the aim of spreading pupils more evenly between schools in the same municipality.

Those responsibilities have since moved to the new Agency for the Management of the Education System (AGSE).

School directors now have greater freedom to accept pupils when they have room for them, rather than being limited to a predetermined number of classes.

The minister believes this should allow more children to attend the school they originally wanted, although he stressed that the change itself is not responsible for the current number of pupils awaiting places.

Teachers are another problem

Finding a desk for a child is only one part of the pressure facing schools.

Portugal is also continuing to struggle to fill teaching posts.

The Government’s new continuous recruitment system has recently been placing around 200 teachers a day. Even so, 563 teaching schedules requested before the beginning of the school year were still unfilled at the end of last week.

More than half of those long-standing vacancies are concentrated in the Greater Lisbon area and the Setúbal Peninsula.

The wider picture changes almost daily. On 2 October, there were 1,301 teaching schedules of varying lengths awaiting placement across the country, as schools continued to request new teachers.

More than 2,100 teachers are also teaching in the Portuguese school system for the first time this year.

The numbers show just how difficult it can be to take a single snapshot of Portugal’s schools at the beginning of September.

Classes may have started weeks ago, but pupils are still enrolling, schools are still looking for teachers and places are still being found.

For families waiting for a school place, of course, that constantly moving system is considerably more personal. It means waiting to find out when, and where, their child can finally start school.

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