Portugal's Prime Minister, Luís Montenegro, said on Friday that fewer students are going without teachers this school year, pointing to figures showing that around 9,200 teachers joined the permanent teaching career under his government.
Montenegro made the comments at the national ceremony marking the start of the school year, held at the newly built Barbosa du Bocage School Centre in Setúbal, a city on the Sado estuary south of Lisbon.
He told the ceremony that the government had already managed to attract more teachers and that the situation this year was much better than last year. He added that the previous school year had itself been an improvement on 2024, and he pledged that by the end of the school year now beginning, in 2027, conditions would improve further still.
Of the roughly 9,200 teachers who joined the profession, he said, about 3,000 were placed specifically in the areas facing the greatest shortages of staff.
Montenegro said the improvement had come from training more teachers, encouraging them toward the teaching profession, and giving them incentives tied to their pay as well as support to help cover housing costs.
Union disputes the figures
José Feliciano Costa, one of the secretary-generals of Fenprof, Portugal's National Federation of Teachers, rejected the prime minister's account. He said that more than 7,000 teachers had joined the career in the past two years, but that most of them had already been working in the education system, so the numbers did not represent a genuine reinforcement of school staffing.
Costa said the shortage of teachers had not been resolved. As an example, he pointed to the Queluz-Belas school grouping, where 19 of more than 40 first-cycle classes were left without a teacher, forcing students to be redistributed among other classes.
He said the government had only resorted to overtime hours and to increasing the number of students per class, without solving the underlying problem.
Since Montenegro first took office as prime minister, in April 2024, 9,050 teachers have retired.
PISA results and education quality
Montenegro also addressed Portugal's poor performance in the PISA study, the international assessment coordinated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that tests the reading, mathematics and science skills of 15-year-old students in dozens of countries every three years.
He said the reality was that teaching in Portugal had lost quality and had lost rigor in recent years, and that this loss of rigor had in turn cost it further in quality.
He defended policies already adopted, such as assessment carried out throughout the learning process, and giving students more opportunities to sit tests through which they can demonstrate the knowledge they have gained.
Montenegro said the government had also taken steps toward greater rigor and quality, toward valuing the teaching profession, toward improving the physical condition of school buildings, and toward better qualifying school managers.
