Schools will lose 4,000 teachers per year over the next decade due to the reform

Around 4,000 teachers will retire annually over the next decade, according to an estimate released today by the Government, which announced that it will finance the costs of training new teachers and encourage an increase in university places.

The estimate is the result of a study diagnosing teaching needs, carried out by the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, which indicates that, on average, by the 2033-2034 academic year, schools will lose around 4,000 teachers per year to retirement.

The scenario, revealed by the Minister of Education, Science and Innovation during a meeting in Lisbon with the country's school principals to prepare for the next school year, worries the executive branch, and so Fernando Alexandre announced a set of measures to increase the training of new teachers in the coming decades.

For now, focusing on the areas with the greatest need (Lisbon Metropolitan Area, Setúbal Peninsula and Algarve), the Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation (MECI) will finance the full training costs of graduates in basic education and master's degrees in teacher training.

"Given a longer-term perspective, given the needs that have been identified, what we're going to do is draw up a contract, which is still being negotiated, but there's already a proposal from the institutions," Fernando Alexandre said to reporters at the end of the meeting.

In line with the higher education financing model, course funding will also be objective-driven, the minister added, noting that "there will be compensation for the number of graduates to provide an incentive for the training of more teachers."

The goal is for higher education institutions to open more classes or new teacher training courses.

"This is a problem that will be felt throughout the country, and therefore, these initial program contracts, which are expected to come into effect in 2025, are targeted at the highest priority areas and are intended to signal that we must respond quickly," he stressed.

According to the minister, education departments across the country “must prepare to meet this challenge, not in the next five years, not in the next decade, but in the coming decades.”

On the other hand, MECI will once again look at the qualifications of teachers (i.e., those who have training in the scientific area they teach, but do not have a degree in teaching courses) and at in-service professionalization, which should be simplified, becoming possible for teachers with at least one year of experience and not five.

During the meeting with school principals, the department also announced the maintenance of some of the measures implemented last year, under the + Classes + Success Plan, to address the problem of teacher shortages.

"We're keeping the ones that worked, the ones that actually allowed us to bring thousands of new teachers into the system," he told reporters.

He gave examples of support for relocation, which benefited 2,807 teachers, the extension of careers beyond retirement age, which allowed 1,496 teachers to remain in schools, and overtime, a mechanism that, starting next year, will be made more flexible so that the number of extra hours is discounted from the non-teaching component that teachers have to complete in schools.