DGS Opens Public Consultation on the New National School Health Programme — 40% of Schools Get Expanded Sex Education With Consent, Identity and Sexual Violence Modules Through 2030

The Direção-Geral da Saúde (DGS, Directorate-General of Health) put the new Programa Nacional de Saúde Escolar (PNSE, National School Health Programme) out for public consultation on Friday 6 June 2026 — the first revision of the country's school-based public-health framework since the prior cycle expired. The headline target: deliver expanded sexual-education projects in at least 40% of schools by the end of the programme's run, with full coverage of physical-activity infrastructure across the entire school network by 2030.

The PNSE is a coordination instrument rather than a curriculum. It tells school health teams — typically a doctor and a nurse linked to a school cluster (agrupamento de escolas) through the local Agrupamento de Centros de Saúde (ACES, Health Centre Grouping) — how to prioritise their work alongside teachers and parents. The document under consultation, drafted by DGS technical teams and signed off by the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education, sets five priority axes for the next planning cycle.

The five axes — and where sexual education fits

The five axes are: mental health and well-being; addictive behaviours and dependencies; healthy eating; sexuality; and physical activity. Sexual education sits inside the sexuality axis and absorbs the bulk of the document's most concrete commitments. The PNSE lists four sexual-education topic clusters that schools should cover: bodily changes and self-esteem; assertiveness and sexual consent; identity, gender and diversity; and sexual violence.

The 40% schools target is the headline figure — the share of the country's roughly 6,000 school units that the programme commits to reaching with an expanded sexual-education project, against the lower coverage delivered under the prior framework. The lower bound is described in the consultation document as a floor, not a ceiling.

Why this lands in public consultation now

The opening of the public consultation comes one year after the 2025 controversy around revisions to the Cidadania e Desenvolvimento (Citizenship and Development) curriculum — the cross-cutting subject through which most schools formally deliver content on sexuality, civic rights, and equality. That dispute, which played out across the summer and autumn of 2025, made any new framework touching identity, gender, and sexual education politically contentious before its first paragraph was drafted.

DGS is using the public-consultation route precisely to head off that exposure: any citizen, school, parent association, professional order, or political party can file a formal comment, and the agency must answer the substantive ones before the final version is published in Diário da República (DR, Official Gazette).

Infrastructure targets and the 2030 horizon

Alongside the sexual-education target, the PNSE sets a single infrastructure ambition with a hard date: by 2030, every school in the country should have "adequate spaces for physical-activity practice." The target is at the soft end of the spectrum — what counts as "adequate" is defined inside the school-cluster planning loop rather than centrally — but pairs with the Ministry of Education's parallel school-rehabilitation tape, which the Council of Ministers has been topping up in tranches through 2026.

The consultation window for the PNSE runs through July, after which the final version is expected to be signed off ahead of the 2026/27 school year.