As has happened in recent years, the return to school will once again be marked by a shortage of teachers in many schools, especially in the Lisbon metropolitan area, but also in educational establishments in the Alentejo and Algarve.

The start of the school year is scheduled for Monday, but in 60% of schools, the gates open today to welcome students and in another 20% the official return to school will take place on Friday.

“During the first two days, 80% of schools will be open and I would like to thank the directors for their efforts to ensure that, as we had challenged, classes could start in the first few days,” the Minister of Education, Science and Innovation told Lusa.

Despite this effort, the same problem that has plagued the return to school in recent years is being repeated.

At the beginning of the week, the results of the second recruitment reserve left 1,091 timetables unfilled, in addition to the timetables made available daily through school recruitment, the last resource available for recruiting teachers.

The situation, Fernando Alexandre admits, could worsen in the coming days, with the need to replace teachers who are on sick leave.

The subjects with the greatest shortage are Computer Science, with 86 timetables to be filled, Portuguese (65 timetables), Mathematics (63 timetables), Physics and Chemistry (53 timetables), and History and Geography (98 timetables).

The number of teachers, which was usually around 150,000, recorded its first decrease in many years in the 2022/2023 school year, with 0.55% fewer in schools compared to the previous year, according to data from the Directorate-General for Education Statistics (DGEEC).

In an attempt to reduce the number of students without classes, the Government presented this summer the “+ Classes, + Success” plan, with a set of measures ranging from the possibility of hiring retired teachers with extra pay or calling on PhD scholarship holders to teach.

In addition to this plan, the Government approved travel support for teachers placed in schools where it is difficult to hire and has also designed a new extraordinary competition, which will place these teachers in the first term teachers.

The number of students in Portuguese schools is increasing again this year, thanks to the immigrant community, with more than 900,000 primary school students and another 400,000 secondary school students expected, according to the latest data available on the DGEEC website.

After decades in which the number of students had been decreasing, the 2021/2022 school year marks a turning point in this trend thanks to the arrival of immigrant students, who currently represent almost 14% of the total number of students, the Minister of Education revealed this week.

The Minister acknowledges that this is a “challenge” for schools since around a third of children and young people do not speak Portuguese, but there is already a program approved this week by the Council of Ministers to enable teachers to integrate these students.