Nearly 460 Classes in Portugal's State Schools Have 30 or More Pupils, and the Minister Says Finding Every Child a Place Comes First
Fernando Alexandre told parliament that 335 of about 52,000 classes have 30 pupils and 124 have more. Late enrolments keep arriving, and he confirmed he scrapped the regional planning meetings the Socialists say would have prevented it.
Portugal's Education Minister, Fernando Alexandre, told parliament on Wednesday that of roughly 52,000 classes in the state school system, 335 have exactly 30 pupils and 124 have more. That puts close to 460 classes at or beyond the figure the minister himself treats as the ceiling, in the first weeks of a school year that opened with hundreds of children still waiting for a place.
"There are classes at the limit. Some have gone over the limit, but the rules allow that," he said, during a current-affairs debate on the start of the school year that the Communist Party (PCP) had requested. His defence was one of priorities: a child without a school is a worse outcome than a crowded classroom, and the first job is to get every pupil placed.
How the classes got so full
Last week the ministry's services acknowledged that "administrative solutions" were being used to absorb pupils who still had no school. The options on the table were opening new classes, reorganising school buildings, or adding pupils to existing classes so that nobody was left out. Alexandre had earlier said that "up to 30 pupils, there is no evidence that it is bad for the quality of teaching", a remark the opposition returned to repeatedly on Wednesday.
The numbers he gave the chamber show the pressure is ongoing rather than a single start-of-year spike. At the beginning of this week 52 pupils were still waiting for a place. On Monday the system received 179 new enrolments, and on Tuesday another 149 requests arrived. The minister blamed late enrolments for most of the problem, said the same thing had happened in previous years, and added without giving a figure that "a significant number" of these cases involve foreign pupils who join the system at different points during the year.
Once a child has a seat somewhere, he said, finding a better-suited class or school is work for the schools within each municipality to coordinate.
The planning meetings he scrapped
The sharpest exchange was about who is supposed to be organising this. Socialist MP Miguel Cabrita said that in earlier years the regional teams of the schools directorate, the Direção-Geral dos Estabelecimentos Escolares (DGEstE), had sorted out placements before term began, and that "this year nobody coordinated, nobody took precautions, nobody dealt with it, nobody solved it, nobody cared".
Alexandre confirmed that he had ended those planning meetings. What they did, he argued, was move classes from schools with spare places to schools with teachers who had no class to teach. Under his instruction, head teachers could respond to demand themselves within the permitted ratios. That had cost some schools classes, he conceded, but parents could now enrol children at the school they wanted, rather than where the DGEstE decided they should go.
What families can do
For parents who enrolled late, or who have arrived in Portugal mid-year, the practical message from Wednesday's debate is that the system will find a place first and sort out the fit afterwards. A child may begin at a school that was not the family's first choice, or in a class of 30, and then be moved. Families still waiting are best placed dealing directly with the school cluster (agrupamento) where they applied, since on the minister's own account it is now head teachers, not a regional team, who decide how demand is absorbed.
