Inefficient management of public schools contributes to teacher shortages

The research paper 'Teacher Needs: deficit or inefficiency in the management of teaching provision?', released to the public today, concludes that the current lack of teachers is partly due to the inefficiency of these processes.

Among the factors that may justify the shortage of teachers in public schools, EDULOG, the Belmiro de Azevedo Foundation's think tank for education, points to the organisation of the school supply network. The network presents a high discrepancy in the distribution of students, with around 40% of schools in mainland Portugal having fewer than 15 students and 26% having fewer than 10 students, distributed across the different years of the school cycles.

In the case of the 3rd cycle of Basic Education, in particular, there is a trend towards an increase in the number of schools with fewer than 15 students – namely five students per year of schooling – resulting from the demographic decline recorded in most regions of the mainland.

In Secondary Education, the scenario is even more alarming, with around 50% of professional courses offered by public schools enrolling less than 15 students, which represents a waste of resources, especially teachers and public money.

In response to this challenge, EDULOG recommends better organization and compliance with the criterion of complementarity between schools in the same municipality or in a group of neighboring municipalities, as well as the integration of the 1st and 2nd cycles into a single cycle corresponding to Primary Education – as is the case in other countries – in order to reduce the dispersion of the teaching offer.

On the other hand, the ratio between enrolled students and the number of teachers in public education is also highlighted as one of the challenges that impacts the current need for teachers. According to EDULOG, in the last 10 years (between 2014 and 2023), the education system lost around 117 thousand students and gained more than 9 thousand teachers, a scenario that created imbalances in the ratio between the number of enrolled students and the number of teachers in public education. With the exception of Pre-school, which registered a slight increase, all other levels of education saw a decrease in the number of enrolled students, with the 1st and 3rd cycles and Secondary seeing an increase in the number of teachers.

When compared with the reality of other countries, the Portuguese education system appears to be in an apparently favourable situation in the 1st and 2nd cycles, where there is a ratio of one teacher to 12 students, but it is highly unregulated in the 3rd cycle and in secondary education – both in scientific-humanistic courses and in professional courses – where there is a ratio of one teacher to every 8 to 9 students.

This mismatch between the supply of education and demographic trends can be explained, according to EDULOG, by the excess supply and/or inefficiency in the management of the school network. The figures show, for example, that in pre-school and primary education (1st, 2nd and 3rd cycles) around 30% of classes do not meet the minimum number of students per class stipulated by law, with the average class size being 20 students. In the case of secondary education, this proportion ranges from 30% in science and technology courses to 79% in professional courses.

Another point of analysis in the EDULOG study concerns the way in which classes are formed. Here, the think tank points to a significant misalignment between the standards and criteria defined by the Ministry of Education for the formation of classes and the current reality, particularly in the formation of classes in Professional Courses, which today often have a number of students per class below the legal minimum, largely due to the progressive increase in the teaching offer.

To solve this problem, EDULOG suggests greater rigor in class validation, as a way of meeting the needs of teachers in the short and medium term, a period that is essential for other measures – such as increasing the number of students attending teacher training courses – to be able to reduce the estimated deficit by the end of this decade. Another important measure is related to the need for greater cooperation and complementarity in the provision of courses between schools and groups of schools, whether those located in the same municipality or those located in neighboring municipalities that do not require students to travel very long distances.

Finally, EDULOG highlights the organisation of school time, namely class time, the organisation of weekly timetables, workloads and the annual calendar. In particular, the variation in teaching times for curricular units, with durations between 45, 50 and 90 minutes, creates waste, and gains could be made if all schools adopted 50-minute units – in this case, for every 10,000 90-minute timetables, 181 full timetables could be freed up. On the other hand, Portugal, when compared to other OECD countries, has a low number of school days per year, despite the increase in subjects taught and their respective workloads in recent years for the different education cycles, with a special emphasis on secondary education.

As necessary adjustments, EDULOG highlights, in addition to the generalization of 50-minute classes, solutions such as: the standardization of mandatory school time that does not exceed 25 hours; a slight change to the school calendar, allowing to start a little earlier and finish a little later, as a way of easing the workloads provided for in the curricular matrices; compensating for the annual increase in teaching hours resulting from the previous point, with a relief of some weekly workloads of subjects whose sum exceeds the 25 mandatory hours.

“It is no longer enough to look at the problem of the need for teachers only from the perspective of the attractiveness of the teaching profession and, consequently, the increasing difficulty of replacing generations of teachers”, says David Justino, member of the EDULOG Advisory Board and author of the study. “What this new study shows us is that the problem is systemic, and that the answer will also have to involve the creation of mechanisms that allow for more efficient use of human resources”.

“We therefore need a much more standardized and efficient public school management model, a measure that must be complemented by a greater focus on teacher training – especially in the most critical areas of knowledge –, as well as by creating better working conditions and career progression for teachers, in order to minimize the impact of the lack of teachers”, he concludes.