Basic and secondary schools have 1.262 teachers teaching without being professionalized, according to data from the Ministry of Education, which today began a negotiation process to review the legal regime for teachers' professional qualifications.
According to a source from the Ministry of Education, this year schools are using more teachers with their own qualifications than last year, when there were around a thousand teachers teaching without being professionalized: This year there are already 1.262 teachers placed with their own qualifications.
After schools fail to fill vacancies in national competitions and recruitment reserves, management can hire teachers with their own qualifications.
This year, for example, there were schools that placed three different teachers for the same time, who were consecutively refused, according to a ministry source.
The use of hiring people with scientific training, but without didactic and pedagogical training, has been increasing and now the authority wants to attract these professionals to schools and reinforce the training capacity for their professionalization.
The guardianship's proposal is that teachers with a master's or doctorate degree undertake an internship lasting just one semester, without prejudice to the frequency of curricular units within the scope of specific didactics covered by the respective pedagogical group.
The ministry's proposal is that teachers with four years of experience can replace the internship with a report.
To combat the lack of teachers in schools, the Government has taken several measures to make the career more attractive, and today it is presenting a set of measures to unions, such as granting paid internships to master's students who are studying to become teachers.
In the same sense, internships for the Pre-School Education recruitment group could also be carried out, in the next academic year, in daycare centers, according to the guardianship's proposal, which will thus support the increase in vacancies announced this year by the Ministry of Social Security .
Also according to data from the Ministry of Education, more than five thousand teachers have been on sick leave since classes began three weeks ago.
On the day that the Ministry of Education's office begins negotiations with unions to present a new legal regime for the professional qualification of teachers, with the aim of combating the lack of teachers, a source from the ministry revealed that schools have more than five thousand requests replacement for sick leave since the beginning of the school year.
According to the guardianship, the cases occur all over the country, with a slight incidence being noted in the north.
The general lack of teachers, one of the biggest problems that many schools deal with on a daily basis, is most noticeable in the Lisbon area and in the south of the country.
At the beginning of the year, an estimate made by the National Federation of Teachers (Fenprof) pointed to around 80 thousand students without teachers for at least one subject, a situation that Fenprof warned would worsen by the end of the year due to cases of teachers with assigned classes but who were going to retire.
Fenprof pointed out that, between September and December 2023, more than a thousand teachers would retire, leaving thousands of students without classes, since many of the vacancies that are being opened by schools have no candidates.
Today, the ME is moving forward with a negotiation round to make the teaching career more attractive, advocating that master's students start to undertake paid internships in the second academic year, which could reach 1.600 euros gross per month, that is, the equivalent of a teacher in the 1st tier.
The proposals presented to the unions also include a set of measures thinking about teachers with their own qualifications.
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