The Education Minister Will Pilot a Single Six-Year Basic Cycle in 2027/28, and First Cycle Teachers Would Lose Three Hours of Their 25-Hour Week

Fernando Alexandre, the Minister for Education, Science and Innovation, said on Thursday that the government intends to run a pilot in the 2027/28 school year that merges Portugal's first and second cycles of basic education. He set it out in an interview with Renascença and Público. The effect, if the pilot becomes the model, would be a single continuous cycle running from the first to the sixth year, covering roughly ages six to twelve, which the minister has described as a structure without parallel elsewhere in Europe.

Portuguese basic education is currently split three ways: four years in the first cycle, two in the second, three in the third. The break between the fourth and fifth years is the one that changes a child's school life most. A pupil goes from one teacher for almost everything to a timetable of subject specialists, often in a different and larger building, in a single September.

What Is Being Prepared

The work is being done alongside the Instituto de Educação, Qualidade e Avaliação, which is revising the essential learning objectives and the curricular matrix. The stated aim is to bring the two cycles closer together so that the fourth-to-fifth-year transition stops being so abrupt. The minister has said the change would not necessarily end monodocência, the single-teacher regime in the first cycle, which is the point on which the reform's shape turns: a merger that keeps one teacher per class through the sixth year is a very different proposition from one that pushes subject teaching down into the earlier years.

A second element concerns teachers' hours. First cycle teachers currently carry 25 hours of weekly teaching time, against 22 hours for other teachers at the start of their careers. Fernando Alexandre has said that difference no longer makes sense and has raised bringing first cycle teaching loads closer to everyone else's, with a reorganisation of school time and of pupils' activities to absorb the change.

An Old Idea With a New Deadline

The idea itself is not new. The Conselho Nacional de Educação, the state's standing advisory body on education, has argued for ending the second cycle for close to twenty years, and in 2008 commissioned a study by researchers at several Portuguese universities that weighed the options. That study set out a six-year first cycle as one possibility, splitting the second cycle so that one year attaches to the cycle below and one to the cycle above as another, and joining the second cycle to the third as a third. It did not recommend a route between them.

What is new is the date. The intention to restructure the cycles appears in the government programme, under a heading about a demanding and flexible curriculum, as a commitment to integrate the first and second cycles in order to align with international practice and secure greater continuity. The minister first attached 2027/2028 to it in a parliamentary hearing in January.

Teacher organisations have criticised the pace and the absence of public debate. The FNE has asked the ministry for institutional respect and clarification and lodged formal reservations; the Fenprof has said the question is not merely technical or neutral. The Confederação Nacional das Associações de Pais, the parents' confederation, has said it wants a smoother transition between cycles but that first cycle schools are not equipped to take pupils up to the age of twelve, and has raised class sizes. Teachers in the monodocência movement have warned that mixing eleven and twelve year olds with six year olds in large buildings, with the current numbers of operational assistants, creates supervision problems at break times.

The announcement lands two days after Portugal's PISA 2025 results, which showed a ten-year science slide close to three times the OECD average.