Current situation: overview of innovative reforms and interventions

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As noted above, in the period between 2011-2013 Portuguese education experienced a significant drop in recruiting new teachers which significantly influenced the age structure of the teaching profession. Parallel to this, several reforms were put in place targeting the quality of teaching, such as revising the entry requirements for initial teacher training, renewal of fixed term contracts and limiting them to five years, as well as developing a new system for teacher continuous professional development (CPD). The new CPD provision better targeted teaching skills and pedagogical knowledge, which has been a step away from core subject knowledge that was previously the focus of CPD (European Commission, 2015).

An important element of the Portuguese education system is the school resource management which clusters schools by their geographic locations. The school clusters (agrupamento de escolas) on average includes all levels of pre-tertiary schooling, including pre-schools and kindergartens, three cycles of education (up to grade 9), and secondary school including secondary vocational provisions. This allows better organisation of educational objectives across a school cluster in a geographic area and enables a better use of school human and material resources. Teachers are contracted and appointed to a specific school cluster through a central national system that supports equal distribution of experienced and novice teachers across the country.

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Figure 14: The outline of the comprehensive mix of legislative measures

Source: Ministry of Education, Portugal (2017)

At the very top of this policy mix sits the National Plan for Educational Success (Programa Nacional de Promoçao do sucesso escola - PNPSE) paired with an intervention that has shown to be both necessary and very helpful, Priority Intervention Educational Areas Programme (Territórios educativos de intervencão prioritária – TEIP). The former, PNPSE, is a cornerstone for all governmental initiatives and interventions, as well as a repository for schools where information can be transparently found.

Under the provision of this educational strategy, continuous professional development in Portugal has moved from the pre-existing model of individual teacher training needs to organisational needs where teachers collectively at the level of school need to identify professional development needs according to the schools’ educational plans. The CPD is done through the Teachers’ Training Centres of School Associations / clusters and can be delivered by experts in the required field. The possible trainers can be consultants at school levels or from the ministry, academics and researchers from universities, and teachers that have the required qualifications. Organisational needs are identified within the schools’ strategic plan which is jointly developed and discussed by the entire school community.

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Profile of the students leaving compulsory education (Perfil dos alunos à saída da Escolaridade Obrigatória) is a state document that provides the idea of competences students need to obtain at the end of their compulsory education (end of the third cycle). The document was published in 2017 following a long process of open multilevel public consultations which included teachers, school leadership, parents and caregivers, students, representatives of industry, non-governmental structures, and community leaders. The process included a wide national survey as the expert interviews confirmed:

“We had a big discussion, a big national audition of students, then we had a national audition of teachers, then we had several regional auditions of parents, then employers, trade unions, commerce, industrial federations, then the minister created a group of national experts some of which are former ministers of education and researchers from professional associations. They came with a 20-page document on what is expected from investing in 12 years of education. It contains a list of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that are quite aligned with OECD and European Commission papers. After this process, the Ministry asked for each association of subjects to look into the national curriculum and devise what is essential as an output that will contribute to the identified content of this document. They also had a task to advise what can be freely managed by teachers. So basically, what is instrumental and what is essential” (Ministry of Education focus group).

The external expert that works with the schools in different projects confirmed this, noting that through a survey approximately 25000 teachers across the country were asked about the current conditions and development of active strategies, about the school organisation and the curriculum. The expert added that students, who were asked about similar aspects of their education, answered similarly to teachers, the governmental bodies, and other sectors, concluding that they “wanted to learn more actively, about things that are connected to day to day life, and about things that matter in life” (Education expert interview).

The core competence document has been advised to schools and has been in use from beginning of the school 2017/2018 year, with an expectation that schools devise their own regionally relevant curricula that will follow the essential competences, promoting values, and teaching knowledge and skills proposed in the document. Using the opinions shared in the focus group at the ministry:

“The core competence document is more than curriculum, more than content, we are talking about competence, about subjects, about values, about skills. So the teachers are not doing well is they teach only subjects because in the end we want to achieve competence and this is more than subjects alone, as it is evident in the document”

(Ministry of Education focus group).

Among the other legislative provisions presented in Figure 14, the most important in

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understanding the scope of current Portuguese attempt at innovation in education are the two programmes, namely the Essential learning and flexible management (renamed into Curricular autonomy and flexibility) and Pilot Project for Pedagogical Innovation. Even though it might not seem evident, these two come tightly connected with the Qualifica programme which is a provision on adult learning and lifelong learning.

“The idea behind [Qualifica] is that besides the preschool enrolment, a high predictor of school success is the level of qualification within the student family. If families are more qualified [educated], they will be more engaged in the process of the student’s learning and the school, so the qualification of the student becomes relevant to the families” (Educational expert, Portugal).

The programme is interlinked with all the other provisions and comes as an elemental learning outcome from the TEIP programme where working with families on cases of dropouts was one of the most essential support methods for reducing the numbers of early school leavers.

The Pilot Project for Pedagogical Innovation (Projeto-Piloto de Inovaçáo Pedagógica, PPIP) has strongly followed this logic; in 2016 the Ministry of Education invited six schools to participate in a pilot project within which the selected schools will have an absolute autonomy over all decisions, and under two conditions:

1. Any (new) activities within PPIP cannot cost more than what is predicted by the allocated state budget

2. The national mechanism for teacher recruitment cannot be changed.

The six schools had the freedom to reorganise classes, define an alternative curriculum, install new methodologies, even influence the timing and organisation of student classes. In the focus group interview which included the ministry and one of the PPIP school leaders, four general innovative categories have been identified (Kovacs & Tinoca, 2017, p. 80):

a) Organisation of student classes – the organisation of students into classes can be shifted to suit a pedagogical logic rather than administrative one that is in current use. Schools have the freedom to reorganise students in way that better suits the overall learning paradigms

b) Organisation of subjects – the current subject division can be changed to a more suitable manner, including bringing subjects together or abolishing them and proposing new ones

c) School timetable – there is an absolute freedom that schools can take to recognise the

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class length, as well as the division of academic terms

d) Curriculum – the schools have taken the freedom in shifting the curricular content, abolishing unnecessary elements, introducing their own contents and overall negotiating the more local and more relevant curriculum.

The main aim of the PPIP was to encourage creation and implementation of alternative school strategies that can enhance the quality and relevance of learning for all students and to further tackle the issue of student retention. With having the full freedom to adjust their curricular and organisational aspects of the school, the decision making remains at the level of the school and the local community. In fact, within three years of the programme, the six schools have all taken one full year to negotiate the change with the main stakeholders, namely to communicate and gather information from teachers and students within the school, as well as parents, local industries, and municipal representatives outside the school. In this way, the agreement for the proposed changes was shared and the principals had both the insight and the legitimacy to continue. The year of negotiation was also used for preparing teachers for engaging with experimental methodologies and curricular changes.

At the ministry level, the essence and the success of the PPIP is of a great value, because upon its finalisation, the lessons learnt would help in understanding in what ways and with which mechanisms Portuguese education can “unfreeze the pedagogies” that have been unchanged since the 19^th century (Kovacs & Tinoca, 2017).

The other innovative provision, Curricular autonomy and Flexibility (Autonomia e Flexibilidade Curricular) deals with providing more autonomy to school leadership and management, and more flexibility in the curricular activities within the classroom setting. The call for engaging in this measure was open in 2017 and 235 school clusters across the country joined. The provision is highly flexible in itself, therefore, the schools can contextualise it as they find most appropriate and apply the measure at a level of one grade, several grades, or the whole school. The aim of the initiative is to promote a better learning outcome including the development of higher-level skills, especially with focusing on the core competences. The legal provision allows the management of the curriculum to work in a more flexible and contextualised way, and most importantly recognises the effective exercise of autonomy in education with the notion that this autonomy should be guaranteed at the level of curriculum.

In the words of the educational expert:

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“The idea is that the school can rearrange 25% of the curriculum. They can create new subjects, by integration of subjects of the curriculum, they can organise the structure of the school year, they can rearrange the disciplines and subject delivery. It is a way of trying new approaches. In this project we are bringing subject to the core curriculum – citizenship” (Educational expert interview).

This initiative comes as both a freedom and demand for teachers that do not always feel prepared for the task and that too often in the recent past have been asked to follow the prescribed curriculum. Notions of this are also visible in the further exploration of the data from the selected schools.