Missão Escola Pública (MEP), a non-partisan movement of teachers, makes a worrying assessment of the 1st period of this academic year, marked by persistent “structural problems”“despite successive resolution announcements”. It guarantees that this semester after school, thousands of students did not have a teacher for one or more subjects. It also states that “teachers accumulate costs and work without timely compensation and schools see their bureaucratic burden aggravated, in a context of increasing professional exhaustion”. “This assessment confirms warnings that have been made throughout the school year and highlights the distance between political discourse and the reality experienced in schools”can be read in the statement released on the afternoon of this Friday, December 19th.
The MEP also criticizes the Government for continuing to not disclose “concrete numbers” of students affected by the lack of teachers, “despite the Minister of Education’s repeated promises to disclose” these data. “The survey recently promoted by MEP demonstrates that obtaining these numbers is a matter of political will, not technical impossibility. If the Ministry does not disclose them, it is not because it cannot calculate them — it is because it chooses not to do so”accuses the movement. Teachers reiterate their concern about what they call a serious “normalization of the situation” regarding the lack of teachers. “The absence of effective structural measures continues to push the problem into the future, worsening the prognosis for the coming years and normalizing a situation that should be exceptional”, explains MEP, in the statement.
The results of a survey released this week by the movement reveal that almost 40% of the 88 groups that responded to the study report the existence of students without a teacher during the entire first academic period, in at least one subject. The survey also highlights a widespread use of overtimewith a significant number of schools indicating that more than ten teachers are providing additional teaching services to make up for the lack of teachers, “revealing management carried out at the limit and lacking sustainability in the medium term”.
Late payments and costs assumed by teachers
According to MEP, throughout the first period, “thousands of teachers ensured the functioning of schools by bearing, out of their own pocket, high travel and accommodation costs or working overtime without any immediate compensation”. Only “after strong public pressure”, he adds, did some payments begin to be made, such as travel allowance and overtime. Even so, the statement states, “there are hundreds of teachers who will only receive these amounts next year, having fully borne the costs throughout the quarter”.
Changes in the Citizenship discipline lead to more bureaucracy
The MEP also criticizes the recent changes in the Citizenship and Development discipline which, they guarantee, have resulted in “a significant increase in bureaucracy in schools”. “Teachers and directors continue to identify administrative burden as one of the main factors of professional burnout, in a context in which bureaucratic demands accumulate”they highlight in the statement. This increase in bureaucracy, explains the movement, has to do with the need to “make more grids, plans and records to fill out”. “As a direct consequence, the number of hours of evaluation meetings increased, further aggravating the workload. The topic of Citizenship assumed media centrality, but this exposure did not translate into concrete changes in educational work, only a reinforcement of the associated bureaucracy”, he states.
Criticisms of the Minister of Education’s speech
Fernando Alexandre, Minister of Education, Science and Innovation (MECI), has, according to the MEP, failed in his speech and in his way of communicating, with “public statements that are out of touch with reality”. Teachers recall, in the statement, that, at the end of the first period of the previous school year, the minister stated that there had been a 90% reduction in the number of students without a teacher. Statements later rectified by Fernando Alexandre. This academic year, says MEP, “these gaps have worsened”. To counter the Government’s “optimistic speech”, MEP ensures that “the first period confirms the persistence of structural problems in Public Schools: lack of teachers, lack of transparent data, delays in payments and increased bureaucracy, along with a political discourse that does not always follow the reality experienced in schools”.
The Public School Mission calls for the enhancement of the teaching career and calls for the order of priorities in the negotiations regarding the revision of the Teaching Career Statute to be changed, “putting salary enhancement, career progression and the effective reduction of bureaucracy at the center”.