Fenprof Brings Thousands of Teachers Onto Lisbon's Streets on Saturday 16 May for 'Mais Respeito pela Escola Pública' March — Pay, Career-Length Backlog and Specialist Shortages Top the Demand List

Fenprof, Portugal's largest teachers' union federation, brought thousands of teachers onto Lisbon's streets on Saturday 16 May 2026 in the 'Mais Respeito pela Escola Pública' march — the union's largest demonstration of the 2025-26 school year. The cortejo formed at Marquês de Pombal in mid-afternoon and moved down Avenida da Liberdade to Restauradores, where the union's secretary-general read the platform document to the crowd.

Fenprof did not publish a turnout figure on Saturday night but its district federations pointed to mass turnout from teachers travelling in from Setúbal, Sintra, Loures and Almada. PSP Lisboa cleared the Avenida da Liberdade corridor from the Saldanha-side ramp to Restauradores and held the cortejo on a single carriageway during the descent.

What the Union Is Demanding

The march platform reorganised the union's long-running list around three priorities for the 2026-27 budget cycle:

• Settlement of the missing career time. Fenprof continues to demand recovery of the six years, two months and 18 days of frozen career time that the 2018-2024 government left unresolved across multiple negotiation rounds. The union argues the partial settlement formula offered by the AD government in late 2025 leaves roughly 30,000 teachers still under the unfinished cap.
• A pay revision aligned with cost-of-living and equivalent OECD profile pay scales. Fenprof's economists put the real-terms pay shortfall against the 2009 baseline at more than 15% for early-career teachers and rising to the high teens for mid-career profiles, against an inflation index that ran cumulatively above wages from 2022 onwards.
• A serious response to specialist-teacher shortages. The Direção-Geral da Educação's 2025-26 vacancy data showed persistent shortages in Matemática, Física-Química, Inglês and the Educação Especial cohorts, particularly in the Algarve and the Lisbon metropolitan ring where housing costs are pricing teachers out of the pool of available placements.

The Government's Position

The Ministry of Education has not yet responded to the Saturday march in detail. Minister Fernando Alexandre's team has previously argued that the partial settlement of the career-time backlog was the maximum compatible with the AD government's budget envelope, with the remainder dependent on the 2027 budget cycle. The Strategic Pact for Education that follows the Strategic Pact for Health, both initiated under President António José Seguro, is expected to include a teacher-recruitment chapter but has not yet been published.

The Wider Picture

The Saturday march closes a politically restive month for the teaching profession. The PCP filed a parliamentary motion in late April calling for an immediate settlement of the missing career time; the Bloco de Esquerda followed with its own draft in mid-May. Neither is on the agenda for the parliamentary plenary in the week of 19 May. Fenprof has signalled that a further mobilisation — likely a strike with educational disruption — would follow if the 2026-27 academic-year contract negotiations do not move materially in the union's direction before the summer break.

The Saturday turnout sits in a longer cycle of teacher mobilisation that has shaped Portuguese education politics since the 2022-23 wave of strikes that brought down then-Minister João Costa's last attempt at a partial career-time formula. Fenprof's leadership argues that the political space for the AD government to defuse the issue narrows once the 2026-27 school year opens in September without movement.