All schools will close for the next 15 days, Prime Minister António Costa has just announced. The closing will take effect this Friday, January 22, and there will be no distance learning classes.
As in the March and April confinement, "only host schools will be open for children aged 12 and under whose parents work in essential services".
With the closing of the schools, measures to support families are also moving forward: parents who have to keep their children at home receive 66% of their salary.
"Parents will also have excused absences from work," said António Costa.
In addition to school establishments, citizens' shops and courts will also close, and all non-urgent legal proceedings will be suspended. The remaining public services will only work by appointment.
After the meeting of the Council of Ministers, the executive took this measure which, explained the prime minister, is taken as a "precautionary principle".
After having resisted, the prime minister justified the closure with the "very marked growth" of the British lineage. According to data from the Ricardo Jorge Institute, after last week the strain had «a prevalence of 8%», the number grew, this week, to «20%».
During these 15 days, there will be no classes, not even at a distance.
According to the prime minister, this interruption of classes will be "compensated for in the school calendar, in a way that the education minister will adjust with the school directors."
Despite advancing with the closing of schools, António Costa again stressed that these establishments «are not the main focus of transmission» and recalled that «the interruption of teaching activities is profoundly harmful to the learning process».
The government official also left an appeal to the Portuguese: "it is not because schools are closed that the set of measures to limit circulation, the duty to collect and the mandatory teleworking should be neglected." Not least because these are “additional measures and not substitutes”.
With regard to higher education, which also closes, Costa said that there may be a possibility for universities to “readjust” the assessment calendar.
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