School Psychologists Face Demands to Repay Years of Salary, and Their Professional Order Wants the Collections Frozen

Days before the school year starts, the Ordem dos Psicologos Portugueses has asked the Education Ministry to freeze a set of demands going out to psychologists working in state schools: letters telling them to hand back salary differences they were paid, in some cases running to several thousand euros and stretching over years.

The people affected are the ones the state itself brought in from precarious work. They were regularised under PREVPAP, the Extraordinary Programme for the Regularisation of Precarious Ties in Public Administration, launched in 2017 to convert workers doing permanent jobs on inadequate contracts into proper public-sector posts. Psychologists, social educators, mediators and speech therapists all entered school staff rolls through it.

The two evaluation points that changed everything

The dispute turns on something small and technical. When these workers were placed on a career scale, their service history was reconstituted, and the performance-evaluation points from the 2017 to 2018 cycle were counted. The Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation has since decided those points should not have been counted towards the progressions that followed.

Strip them out and the arithmetic reverses. In some cases the worker drops a step on the pay scale. And at the end of last year, those affected were told that the salary differences they had received since the progression now have to go back to the state. Others in the same programme have been waiting since January 2025 for their career situation to be regularised at all.

The Ordem's phrasing is pointed. "We should not correct the precariousness that affected these professionals for years by creating a situation of insecurity and professional devaluation," said bastonaria Sofia Ramalho. She calls it "a cross-cutting problem that demands an equally cross-cutting response from the state, and that should not oblige each psychologist to go to court individually in search of a solution, which creates situations of inequality".

What has been asked for

Formally, the Ordem has asked the Ministry to suspend and urgently re-examine both the pay-repositioning reviews and the collection procedures, for as long as the applicable legal framework remains unclarified, so as to avoid "economic and professional consequences that are potentially serious and difficult to repair". It also wants a settlement that preserves service time already given, the reconstitution of careers and the rights attached to them.

A meeting has been requested with the Agency for the Management of the Education System, and the Ordem says it is available to work with the Ministry on a solution that is national, uniform and legally secure rather than case by case.

The timing is awkward. Schools open in the coming days, and the staff in question are the ones who run psychological support inside them. Portugal has spent this year expanding what schools are expected to provide: it rewrote its inclusive-education rulebook for January 2027, with schools already warning that the specialist staff to run it are not in place, and it placed 20,404 teachers for September with Lisbon, Setubal and the Algarve still the hardest districts to fill.

What This Means for Expats

• If your child uses school psychological support: nothing has been suspended and no service has been announced as cut. The dispute is about the pay of the people delivering it, not about the service itself, at least for now.
• If you work in the Portuguese public sector: career reconstitution decisions can be revisited retroactively, and a favourable repositioning is not final until the legal basis for it is settled. Keep every despacho and pay slip.
• On repayment demands generally: the state can and does reclaim overpaid salary. What the Ordem is contesting is the reading of the rules, not the principle, which is why it wants collections paused rather than cancelled.
• Precedent worth watching: the same points question could reach other PREVPAP groups. Portugal has been building dedicated career tracks to fix exactly this, from a public dentistry career to a pay rebuild for registry staff backdated to July 2025.

PREVPAP was sold as the end of a decade of improvised contracts in the Portuguese state. Nine years on, the programme's own beneficiaries are being asked to return money they were told they had earned, and the professional body representing them wants the letters stopped before the first bell of the school year.