Lisbon Families Whose Children Still Show as Not Placed Are Taking the Education Ministry to Court, and the Desk That Used to Place Them by Hand Is Gone
Term has started and the Portal das Matriculas still reads Nao Colocado. The parents have formed a group and are preparing to sue. Two teachers explain what disappeared when the DGEstE was folded into the new AGSE: the only people who could see the whole network.
While the Education Minister, Fernando Alexandre, opened the school year at a formal ceremony in Setúbal on Friday, a group of families around Lisbon were looking at the same two words on the Portal das Matrículas (Enrolment Portal) that had been there for weeks: "Não Colocado". Not placed. Term has started. Their children have no school.
Rui Boavida has been waiting since the end of July for an answer on a transfer request for his twins into a ninth-year class. He knows of "more than a dozen" pupils in the same position, families who moved their children out of private schools, among them the Colégio São José and the Colégio Avé Maria. "The kids are at home today," he told the Lusa news agency. "No books, no school, no teacher." Some parents have re-enrolled privately while they wait. Others cannot afford to, so they wait.
The families have formed a group, Não Somos Bonecos (We Are Not Puppets), and are preparing to sue the Ministério da Educação (Education Ministry). "Our aim is that this never happens to another child," Boavida said. "We want to hold the state responsible for how it treats children and families."
The desk that used to fix this has been dissolved
The complaint the parents make most often is not about the shortage of places. It is that nobody answers: no walk-in service, no reply to emails, no reply to the phone.
Until a few months ago there was a counter. The Direção-Geral dos Estabelecimentos Escolares (Directorate-General for School Establishments), or DGEstE, had an office at Praça de Alvalade in Lisbon. It has been wound up and its powers passed to the Agência para a Gestão do Sistema Educativo (Agency for the Management of the Education System), or AGSE, created by Decreto-Lei n.º 99/2025 de 28 de agosto. AGSE absorbs four predecessors at once: the DGEstE, the DGAE, the IGeFE and part of the ministry's general secretariat. The DGAE has been extinct since 1 February 2026 under Despacho n.º 919-A/2026.
"There is no way of making contact in person," Boavida said. "Apparently this new agency is something ethereal, it only exists virtually."
Two teachers described to Lusa what actually disappeared with the old directorate.
Patrícia Gramaxo, of the Agrupamento de Escolas do Restelo, confirmed that school clusters do now have the autonomy to process enrolments. Then she named the catch: "you need there to be places." A cluster with no solution for a family is stuck, because it cannot see what the rest of the network has free. At this point in the year the clusters in a municipality normally meet to pool vacancies and redistribute pupils by area of residence. This year, she said, that meeting has not yet happened.
Luísa Gomes used to hold the missing piece. She planned the school network for the whole municipality of Lisbon, from pre-school to the twelfth year, and made the "administrative placements", the cases the automated system could not resolve. Schools had her mobile number and could ring at any hour. With the DGEstE gone she is back at the Escola Secundária do Restelo without a class assigned. Asked who is now responsible for Lisbon's school network, she said: "I don't know." The other teachers who did that work also returned to their schools. Only the senior technical staff stayed, and Gramaxo suspects there are "probably not enough of them".
Autonomy without the map
The first strategic objective AGSE lists on its own website is "simplification and autonomy of schools", strengthening the autonomy of school clusters. The gap these families have fallen into is the precise cost of doing that without keeping the function that sat above it. As Gramaxo put it: "the ones who know the network are not the schools and not the families, it is the ministry." AGSE's own site still records that the predecessor bodies' websites remain in force "until the conclusion of their extinction and merger process". The reorganisation is not finished, and the school year did not wait for it.
For foreign families the margin is thinner, because a transfer request is the normal route into the system for a child arriving mid-cycle. Nationality is not one of the nine priorities in the enrolment rulebook, and foreign nationals are now about one in seven public-school pupils, concentrated in Lisbon, Setúbal and the Algarve. Our guide to enrolling a child in a public school sets out the portal and the documents. It cannot conjure a place, and this year neither, apparently, can anyone else.
