Conselho Nacional de Educação Walks the Government's Higher-Education Access Rewind Into a 'Consequências Gravosas' Parecer — CNE Unanimously Asks Fernando Alexandre to Repensar the One-Exam-Minimum Proposal That Reverses the 2023 Two-Exam Rule

The Conselho Nacional de Educação — the Republic's consultative body on every diploma the Ministry of Education and Higher Education tries to move through the system — has dropped a unanimous parecer onto the desk of Minister Fernando Alexandre warning that the government's proposed rewind of the access regime to Portuguese higher education carries 'consequências gravosas e impactos preocupantes' for the entire system. The opinion was adopted on 4 May 2026 and made public on Tuesday 12 May, with the full 24-page text now sitting on the CNE website under the file name Parecer_RJGDES_final.pdf.

What the government wants to undo

The substantive trigger is the regime drafted by the previous PS government in 2023, which raised the minimum number of entrance exams required to enter most undergraduate degrees from one to two, on a system-wide basis. The current PSD-CDS executive, through the Ministry of Education and Higher Education, has now circulated a project diploma that walks that rule back: each higher-education institution would once again be free to set between one and three mandatory exams, with the floor returning to a single exam. The Ministry frames the rewind as a return of curricular autonomy to the universities and polytechnics — the same language Alexandre has used in his appearances before the Comissão de Educação at Parliament during the spring.

The CNE's four-point objection

The parecer, adopted unanimously by the council, fires four specific warnings at the project diploma. First, that a one-exam minimum will produce a 'probable reduction in the number of young students entering higher education,' because the breadth of the secondary-school curriculum that the two-exam regime forced students to cover has demonstrable signalling and selection value. Second, that the special-competition tracks — the via for adults in lifelong learning who never finished secondary school under the standard path — will narrow rather than widen. Third, that access to the master's and doctoral pipelines downstream will be compressed because the undergraduate-degree-bachelor-degree-licenciatura intake will be less rigorous. Fourth, and most politically loaded, that the rewind will 'accentuate socioeconomic and sociocultural inequalities' because students from public secondary schools in interior districts already over-rely on the standardised national exam tape to clear the bar against private and large-city candidates. The CNE 'recomenda vivamente' that the proposal 'seja retomada e repensada.'

What the council is and is not saying

The parecer also flags a counter-argument. It explicitly acknowledges that allowing institutions to require only one exam 'may permit more students to complete the access requirements and therefore enrol in higher education' — and praises the autonomy increase that pushing the choice down to the institution implies. But it lands the verdict on the side of the rewind's costs outweighing the benefits, and asks the government to bring the project back into the council for a redrafted version rather than push it through the Conselho de Ministros in its current form.

The procedural calendar

A CNE parecer is consultative — it does not bind the government, and the Ministry of Education can move the diploma forward without redrafting. But the Trabalho XXI playbook of this spring has shown the political cost the Montenegro government pays when it bypasses tripartite consultative bodies: the labour package landed in Parliament with no agreement from social partners, and the parliamentary debate is now running into a no-base-of-support window. Minister Alexandre faces a narrower version of the same trade-off here. The Comissão de Educação at Parliament is already scheduled to take the diploma in late May, and the PS and BE will use the unanimous CNE objection as the spine of their opposition. The opinion sits alongside the broader access-to-university debate that has run since 2018, when the two-exam rule was first proposed in response to the post-Bolonha drift toward a less standardised intake.

Sources: CNE Parecer RJGDES, 4 May 2026; Público, 12 May 2026; Correio da Manhã; Notícias ao Minuto; Ministério da Educação e do Ensino Superior project diploma.