Reforming Teacher Education in Portugal

A call for innovation and old-fashioned action

Abstract

Portugal has a serious problem to solve immediately: the proven lack of teachers to ensure the constitutional right of access to free education in the public education system. Today, in Portugal, more than 30,000 pupils in primary and secondary education are without teachers in some areas of the curriculum.

Although this is an urgent problem, the first topic to be addressed here is the in-service training of current teachers. The degree of urgency in reforming this type of training is less than the shortage of teachers mentioned above, (which will be addressed later in the paper), but the consequence of maintaining the status quo is no less degrading. Unless pre-service training is carried out in the right place (universities and polytechnics), teacher education programmes exist in a kind of logistical chaos, with no attempt to reorganise the system by governments since the 1990s.