558 Teachers Retire This Month and 2,650 Timetables Sit Empty, and the Minister's Bridge Across the Gap Is 20 Million Euros of Overtime

Portugal's teachers went back to their schools on Tuesday 1 September. They found 2,650 timetables with nobody in them, and the Minister of Education telling reporters that the shortage behind those gaps will be with the country for years.

The figure comes from FENPROF (Federação Nacional dos Professores, National Federation of Teachers), the largest teaching union, which said that 2,650 horários em oferta de escola, the fixed-term posts that individual schools advertise and fill themselves, remained unfilled days before classes begin. Together they amount to more than 50,000 teaching hours. The worst concentration is in the 1.º ciclo (the first cycle, roughly ages 6 to 10), where 378 complete timetables have no teacher attached to them.

The minister's answer: overtime

Fernando Alexandre, the Minister of Education, Science and Innovation, did not dispute the shortage. Speaking in Carnaxide, in the municipality of Oeiras, he said plainly: "As for the shortage of teachers, we are going to have it for some years," because "we have 4,000 teachers retiring every year."

What he disputed was the consequence. "A teacher is not missing from the classroom," he said, because the system has "instruments that allow us to compensate for the fact that there is an unfilled vacancy on the establishment." The principal instrument is money. "I remind you again that in the first half of 2026 we paid 20 million euros in overtime, precisely to teachers who went and taught the classes of teachers who had not yet been replaced after retirement or sickness."

That single sentence is the whole policy in miniature. Twenty million euros in six months buys the difference between 2,650 empty timetables and a classroom that still has an adult in it. It is not a hiring plan; it is a purchase of extra hours from teachers who are already working.

For the first cycle, where a class has one main teacher rather than a rota of subject specialists, overtime does not stretch as far. Alexandre conceded it was "a harder problem to solve" and described the fallback: schools work "with the collaboration of the municipalities," and "the solution that is often found is, where there is no teacher, to split the classes" and "in some cases to take classes up to the limit on the number of pupils." His red line was narrow: "What we have to guarantee is that no pupil in compulsory education is left out."

The retirement arithmetic

FENPROF's declaration for the start of the school year, issued the same day, puts numbers behind the minister's four-thousand-a-year remark. In September alone, 558 teachers retire. That is 172 more than in September last year, an increase of 30.8 percent in a single month. The union also reports that in 2025/26 the number of timetables filled through school-level contracting rose by around 30 percent, which it reads as direct evidence that the permanent establishment is no longer big enough to cover the system's needs.

The pattern is consistent with what we reported in August, when almost 3,300 teachers had already retired this year and the government narrowed its 750 euro stay-on bonus to shortage regions. It also sits awkwardly beside the placement round that closed the same month, in which Portugal placed 20,404 teachers for September, with Lisbon, Setúbal and the Algarve still the hardest to staff. Placements are a gross figure. Retirements, sickness and resignations are subtracted from it continuously through the year, which is why a system that announced twenty thousand placements in August can be short of 2,650 timetables in September.

FENPROF's objection is not to the overtime as an emergency measure but to its promotion into a permanent one. Growing recourse to extraordinary work, the federation wrote, "cannot be presented as a structural response to the shortage of teachers." Its own prescription is the familiar one: train, attract, contract and retain, which it argues requires better pay, better working conditions and stability rather than a bigger overtime budget.

When classes actually start

Teachers returned on 1 September; pupils do not. Under the four-year calendar in force, basic education classes begin between 11 and 15 September. Secondary classes for the 10th, 11th and 12th years start later, on 21 September, a date the government confirmed in July and August after weighing whether to move the third cycle as well. The delay exists to keep the start of secondary teaching clear of the extraordinary exam season on 3, 4, 7 and 8 September, and of the marking that follows it, after the summer's digital grading failure left examiners working through interrupted holidays.

A digital sideshow with a real point

The setting for the minister's remarks was not a staffroom but the launch of the first in-person Chave Móvel Digital (Digital Mobile Key) activation desk located inside a school. He was joined by Gonçalo Saraiva Matias, the Minister Adjunct and for State Reform, and the example both men reached for was criminal record certificates, which schools must validate for staff and volunteers at the start of every year.

"In the many conversations I have with head teachers, they conveyed this problem to me, which is the enormous cost of validating criminal records at the start of the year and then over the course of it," Alexandre said. Saraiva Matias described the underlying principle as interoperability: "We only ask people and companies for information once," and institutions are notified when something changes, within data protection limits.

It is a small reform with a measurable payoff for school administrators, and it is also a useful illustration of where the ministry's capacity is going. Digitisation of back-office paperwork is cheap and fast. Producing a primary teacher takes four years of higher education and a placement.

What this means for foreign residents

• Your child will have a teacher, but possibly not the same one all year. The ministry's guarantee covers coverage, not continuity. Substitution through overtime means a class can pass through several teachers across a term, which matters most for children still building Portuguese.
• Primary is where the risk concentrates. If your child is in the 1.º ciclo, the two fallbacks the minister named are splitting classes across other teachers and filling classes to their legal maximum. Ask the school directly which applies to your child's year group.
• Check your start date, not the general one. Basic education begins between 11 and 15 September and the exact day is set by each school cluster. Secondary starts on 21 September. Assuming a single national first day is the most common scheduling mistake for newly arrived families.
• Shortage regions are also the ones with the most foreign residents. Lisbon, Setúbal and the Algarve are the hardest districts to staff and the districts where the foreign population is concentrated. A school in Faro is not experiencing the national average.
• Support staffing is a separate problem. FENPROF flags a shortage of special education teachers and operational assistants alongside the classroom gap, and the rewritten inclusive education rulebook lands mid-year in January 2027. Families relying on additional support measures should confirm arrangements in writing now.
• The paperwork side is getting easier. If you are enrolling for the first time, our guides to the free textbook vouchers and to how the enrolment priority list actually works cover the two questions foreign parents ask most.

The gap between the union's 2,650 and the ministry's reassurance is not really a dispute about facts. Both sides agree the posts are empty and both agree the lessons will be taught. The argument is about what you call a system that closes a structural staffing gap with 20 million euros of overtime every six months, and how many more Septembers it can do it.