Portugal Suspends 62 Teachers After a New Automatic Check Flags Criminal Records Barring Work With Children
The teachers are sent home while the education inspectorate reviews each case. The check, which replaced paper certificates this school year, will keep running, so more cases may follow.
Portugal's Education Ministry has suspended 62 teachers whose criminal records, it says, make them legally unfit to work with children. The cases came to light through an automatic check of teachers' criminal record certificates that the ministry introduced at the start of this school year, replacing the paper checks that school heads used to carry out by hand.
In a statement issued on Wednesday evening and reported by RTP and Público, the ministry said the new system "made it possible to identify 62 teachers in service whose criminal record is, under the law, incompatible with performing duties with minors".
Sent home while each case is reviewed
The 62 teachers will be provisionally removed from their posts and excused from attending school while the General Inspectorate of Education and Science (IGEC) examines each case individually. The education minister, Fernando Alexandre, ordered the inspectorate to carry out "with urgency" an "immediate analysis of all the situations" and to take whatever steps are needed "to guarantee the safety and protection of pupils".
According to the ministry, the inspectors will look at the nature and effect of each conviction or other decision on the record, including whether a court imposed an additional penalty, a security measure or a ban, and will then decide what follows in each case. The ministry has not said what kind of offences are involved, in which schools or regions the teachers work, or whether any of them has already left the profession.
Under a 2009 law, anyone recruited for a job involving regular contact with minors must present a criminal record certificate. Not every conviction rules a person out: what matters is the offence and whether a court imposed a ban, which is why the inspectorate is reviewing each file rather than dismissing the teachers outright.
A check that now runs all the time
Until this year, schools collected the certificates from teachers on paper. The new check, part of a push to digitise and simplify school administration, runs automatically. The government says it allows "permanently updated control" and lightens the paperwork for school management. The same procedure, the statement said, will be followed "whenever the automatic verification process flags an invalid criminal record", so further suspensions are possible as the system runs through the year.
What happens to the classes
The ministry has not named any school, and the suspensions are provisional pending the inspectorate's review. The classes of the 62 teachers will need cover at a time when, by the minister's count earlier this week, 664 timetables across the country, three in four of them in the Lisbon region, were still waiting for a teacher.
