The Inquiry Into Digital Exam Marking Now Has the Votes to Go Ahead, After the Socialist Leadership Moved on Wednesday
Chega committed on Tuesday, the PS national secretariat on Wednesday. The vote falls on Friday, and the terms reach the contracts, the costs and the ministry's own reorganisation.
A parliamentary commission of inquiry into how Portugal marked its national school exams in 2025 and 2026 now looks certain to be created. The Socialist Party's national secretariat met on Wednesday and decided to recommend that its MPs vote in favour, which, added to a commitment already made by Chega, gives the Bloco de Esquerda proposal the numbers it needs.
The sequence over the coming days is tight. The proposal was debated in the chamber on Wednesday. The Socialist parliamentary group meets on Thursday to adopt the recommendation. The vote itself falls on Friday.
The inquiry was tabled by the Bloco de Esquerda and admitted by the Speaker, José Pedro Aguiar-Branco, at the start of July. On Tuesday the leader of Chega, André Ventura, said his party would vote for it: "Chega is going to vote in favour of the commission of inquiry, obviously," he told reporters, adding that it was "important that families feel there is work being done by Parliament" on what he called the chaos in education and in the exams.
What the inquiry is asked to establish
The object is narrower and more technical than the political noise around it. The Bloco wants the commission to establish the scale and significance of the digital classification process for the national exams of 2025 and 2026, and the weight of the failures alleged in the design, execution and supervision of that process.
It then asks for the consequences to be traced: for students, "in particular in access to higher education"; for the teachers who marked the papers; and for the rest of the school community. And it asks for the paperwork. The terms cover "decisions, contracts and responsibilities in the design and execution of the digital classification of the national exams of 2025 and 2026, including identification of the entities involved, the contracts signed, the costs incurred and the supervision mechanisms".
The fourth strand is institutional. The Bloco wants the inquiry to examine what the reorganisation of the Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation did to the exam system: the creation of new bodies including AGSE and EduQA, I.P., the restructuring of the Júri Nacional de Exames, and whether the new entities had the institutional capacity and the working relationship with the exam board that the job required. The stated aim is to establish political, administrative and, where applicable, financial responsibility.
The Socialists had been preparing their own
In the view of the Socialist national secretariat, the "dismantling of the Ministry of Education has had strong impacts not only on the exams, but on the start of the school year". The party said it had put a broad set of questions to the ministry led by Fernando Alexandre which "were not clarified", and that it had been weighing tabling an inquiry of its own had the answers not come.
A separate front opened on the same day. The parliamentary education committee approved two Chega requests for urgent hearings of both the current Education Minister and his predecessor, João Costa, over Portugal's results in the OECD's PISA study. Bloco, PCP and CDS members were not present for the vote, which passed with the remaining parties in favour and Livre abstaining, according to the Chega MP Maria José Aguiar.
The latest PISA round, released this month, shows the performance of Portuguese fifteen-year-olds back at the level recorded two decades ago. Portugal first took part in 2000 with poor results, improved steadily enough to be held up by the OECD as a success story, held level in 2018, and has declined since, in line with a worldwide trend.
