Officials from the National Teachers’ Federation (Fenprof) went to the Ministry of Education to hand in formal warning of a strike from 6 November to 15 December, to affect all work directly with pupils enrolled in non-curricular activities.

For example, a teacher who gives extra help or acts as an assistant in an activity, where these are deemed not to form part of the regular curriculum will be able to strike.

“Teachers … have an overall work week of 35 hours and, at the moment, our broad survey involving thousands of teachers shows that [they] are working, on average, 46 hours and 40 minutes a week,” Fenprof’s secretary-general da Fenprof, Mário Nogueira, told journalists after handing in the strike warning.

He said that the trend to teachers being asked to do activities not directly relating to their academic responsibilities has been established since 2008 and that “this government has not yet responded” to this long-standing problem.

The current Socialist government in 2015 moved to restore the working week for public sector employees to 35 hours, after its predecessor had increased it to 40 hours, in a move it said was necessary as part of austerity measures to make the public sector more efficient and so reduce the deficit.