Portugal Weighs Delaying the Secondary School Year by a Week After a Troubled First All-Digital Exam Season
Education Minister Fernando Alexandre says pushing the start of the secondary school year back by a week is 'on the table', giving teachers time to recover after a marking season disrupted by Portugal's first all-digital national exams. A platform outage locked graders out of some 300,000 scripts an
Portugal's secondary school year may start a week later than planned this autumn, the Education Minister has said, as the system recovers from a bruising exam season that saw the country's first fully digital national tests jam up on the way to the teachers meant to mark them.
Fernando Alexandre, the Minister of Education, Science and Innovation, said delaying the start of the ensino secundário (upper secondary education, roughly ages 15 to 18) by one week is "on the table." The reasoning is not administrative but human: secondary teachers, he said, have been under "great effort" and need time to rest after the marking marathon, so they can arrive in classrooms "with energy." He insisted any delay "will not harm the academic calendar and will benefit students," and stressed it would apply only to secondary schools, not to younger year groups.
A digital debut that misfired
The strain traces back to a reform that was meant to modernise the exam season. For the first time, around 300,000 national secondary exams were digitised and distributed electronically to teachers for correction, replacing the old paper-shuffling. Instead of smoothing the process, the switch created a bottleneck: the online correction platform went into maintenance at a critical moment, locking teachers out of the very scripts they were supposed to be grading.
The Ministry was forced to move its deadlines. Teachers were given until 14 July to classify the papers rather than 10 July, with results pushed from 14 July to the 17th. Some 10,941 teachers were working through the backlog, and unions accused the Ministry of downplaying the chaos, with reports of educators still waiting on scripts days after they were promised. The government, for its part, framed the disruption as the growing pains of a system "changing for the better."
What it means for families
For parents — including the many foreign families whose children attend Portuguese state schools — the practical takeaway is uncertainty at the margins of the calendar. A one-week slip at the start of secondary would nudge back the first day for older pupils without, the Ministry insists, shortening the school year overall; the lost days would be recovered elsewhere in the timetable.
The episode also feeds a broader worry about the pace of digitisation in Portuguese education. Moving hundreds of thousands of exams online is exactly the kind of efficiency the sector has been chasing, but this year's rollout showed how a single platform outage can ripple through an entire calendar — from a marking deadline in July to the first bell of the new school year in September. A final decision on the start date is expected before the summer is out.
