Teachers' Union Faults €42.5 Million for Private Pre-Schools, Pressing for a Public Creche Network

One of Portugal's largest teaching unions has accused the government of bankrolling what it calls a "depósito de crianças" — a place to deposit children — rather than building genuine public childcare capacity. The charge came this week from Fenprof (Federação Nacional dos Professores, the National Federation of Teachers), which objects to public money flowing to private and social-sector providers instead of to the state network.

At the centre of the dispute is the government's strategy for closing a stubborn shortfall of pre-school places. To fill more than 12,000 missing vacancies — concentrated heavily in the Greater Lisbon area — the state is signing contratos de associação (association contracts) with private, cooperative and social-solidarity institutions, paying them to take in children the public system cannot accommodate. Under the scheme, the state contributes roughly €208 per child, with additional incentives reported to reach up to €15,000 for opening a new classroom.

Fenprof puts the price tag on the private and cooperative sector at some €42.5 million spread across the school years from 2025/26 to 2027/28, and calls it money "handed over on a platter" to private operators. The union argues that the cash would be better spent expanding the public network, and it points to what it says is a decade-long retreat by the state: around 403 public jardins de infância (kindergartens) closed over ten years, which Fenprof reads as evidence of a "clear option for privatisation" in early-years education.

The union's demand is for a properly resourced public system covering both ends of early childhood — the creche (nursery, for children up to three) and the pré-escolar (pre-school, from three to six) — with enough places to guarantee a spot for every child. Anything less, it contends, leaves families dependent on a patchwork of private providers whose availability and cost the state does not control.

The government's case is one of pragmatism. With demand outstripping public supply, particularly around the capital, ministers argue that contracting existing private and social institutions is the fastest route to getting children into a classroom now, rather than waiting years for new public facilities to be built and staffed. Officials frame the association contracts as a bridge, not a destination.

For The Portugal Brief's readers, the row is more than an ideological skirmish between a union and a ministry. Foreign families settling in Portugal — and especially in and around Lisbon — routinely run into the same wall the figures describe: too few places, long waiting lists, and a choice that often comes down to whatever private nursery has an opening. How this fight is resolved will shape how easy, and how expensive, it is to find childcare in the years ahead.

No revised plan had been announced in response to the union's criticism by the weekend. For now, the association-contract model stands, and the competition for pre-school places — public or private — looks set to remain tight, above all in the Lisbon districts where the shortage is most acute.