Today, the spokesman for Free Isabel Mendes Lopes considered that the new school year “begins badly”, criticizing the reform of the government in the structures of the Ministry of Education, and wants to know how many students are without teachers.
© Paulo Alexandrino/Global Images
12/09/2026
by
Lusa
“ O school year begins badly exactly because it comes in the continuity of a chaos with which the last school year ends and the problem of exams in practice has not been solved ", lamented Isabel Mendes Lopes, in statements to journalists on the margin of the political rentrée of the Livre, entitled "Os Setembristas", which takes place until Sunday, in Customs of Porto.
Asked about the start of the school year, namely the complaints of lack of teachers, the parliamentary leader also held the “dismantling of the Ministry of Education” by the PSD/CDS-PP government, accusing the executive of having abolished structures and having created an organism, the EduQA (Institute of Education, Quality and Evaluation), which “has no answers”.
“ This shows how this dismantling of the Ministry of Education was done in a completely irresponsible and clueless way, – or perhaps even with a notion, which is even more serious, – of the consequences”, lamented Isabel Mendes Lopes.
The spokesperson for the Free defended a strategy contrary to that which has been followed by the Government and warned that no concrete data are yet known on how many children are without teachers.
“ We do not know how many children do not have classes, do not have teachers, we have to have these data ", defended.
From the perspective of the Free, the solution is to “bet on the appreciation of the teacher’s career”.
“ We really have to bet on teachers, on teachers' careers, and that's not what we see from the government. We see even great ease in the placement of teachers and often teachers do not have, in the background, career or pedagogy to be able to teach in a structural way and in a continuous way”, he warned.
This Friday the schools began receiving students for another school year that will be marked by the prohibition of ‘smartphones’ until the 9th year and by the already announced lack of teachers, especially in the Lisbon area.
Although there are still around 2,700 hours to fill, Fernando Alexandre said that this school year there will be “much fewer students without classes”.
One of the measures to minimize the problem that starts this school year is the possibility of schools calling daily teachers to replace missing teachers, a mechanism that starts on September 18.