Schools are still looking for teachers and specialized technicians to fill 858 timetables and many students will have classes with non-professional teachers in subjects such as IT, Portuguese or Mathematics, warned school director Arlindo Ferreira.
On Tuesday, the directors had 858 empty timetables to fill and, «in most cases, there are no longer professional teachers available for these positions», the director of the Agrupamento de Escolas Cego do Maio, Póvoa de Varzim, told Lusa.
According to Arlindo Ferreira, the most dramatic case concerns the IT discipline, with «182 full and annual timetables», which could mean «around 50 thousand students without a teacher».
The solution, he argued, will have to involve hiring teachers with their own qualifications for teaching, that is, non-professionalized teachers, because “there may even be professionalized teachers who have not competed or who have abandoned teaching and now have discovered a vacancy on the doorstep. from home, but there will be very few».
The data shows that the demand for teachers is concentrated in the region of Lisbon and the Setúbal Peninsula: Lisbon schools had, on Tuesday, 74 empty timetables and in Setúbal there were another 43 timetables, according to the analysis carried out by the education specialist.
«Teachers are not available to go to work in the most expensive city in Europe and receive little. Teachers do not compete for some areas, such as Lisbon and the Algarve, and the students are always the ones who suffer,” he lamented.
In this search, it also stands out Faro, which announced 19 IT schedules, and Alentejo, with 21 schedules in schools in Beja, Évora and Portalegre.
The most popular subjects are Geography (73 timetables to be filled) and Physics and Chemistry (42), but Arlindo Ferreira also considers Mathematics and Portuguese to be worrying.
«We are starting to have a serious shortage of teachers in these two subjects subject to examination, which further increases the inequalities of students who will have teachers with less quality because they are not professional», he warned.
In the case of Portuguese, on Tuesday, there were 26 complete annual timetables for 3rd cycle and secondary classes to be filled.
According to the director's calculations, each timetable may concern three or four classes, that is, «there will be around 1.800 students without a Portuguese teacher, who will have classes taught by non-professionals».
There are nine Portuguese timetables to be filled in schools in Palmela, another nine in Sintra and six in Loures.
In Mathematics, there are another 34 timetables for 3rd cycle and secondary classes that remain empty, with emphasis on schools in Amadora, Loures, Moita, Odivelas, Setúbal and Sintra.
Last week, the Minister of Education announced that 95% of the timetables had already been allocated: Of the 13.487 timetables requested by schools, 12.814 had been filled.
One of the explanations for the lack of teachers being concentrated in the south is that there are more teachers being trained in the north.
Both school directors and teachers' unions have defended the creation of support for travel and accommodation for displaced teachers and, this year, the Government announced the provision of 29 apartments at affordable rents, but teachers consider the measure insufficient.
The lack of teachers in schools, caused in part by the aging of the class and the lack of attractiveness of the profession among younger people, led the government to allow schools to select teachers who hold courses recognized as qualifications for teaching.
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