As calls for the resignation of Education Minister Nuno Crato seem certain to get a result, a government source has announced that all children still missing classes are guaranteed extra schooltime to make them up. That’s of course, once they have been allocated teachers.
In Sintra, Amadora and Matosinhos alone, schools are short of as many as 500 teachers. In the Algarve, there are still places for 300.
The reality translates into 20,000 children up and down the country still without a fully-functional timetable. Many are without as many as three subjects, which involves long periods in the day where children simply have nothing to do.
The fiasco is even more inexplicable in as much as Education Minister Nuno Crato has seemed powerless to sort it out.
Speaking in SIC TV over the weekend, former PSD leader and political commentator Marques Mendes revealed Crato “no longer has the conditions to be a minister”.
Marques described an ongoing “war between the coalition parties within the Education Ministry” and claimed that Crato and the secretary of state for teaching and school administration “no longer talk to each other”.
Adding that the latter, João Casanova de Almeida, should be dismissed for insensitivity, Marques said Crato had been “captured” by ministerial bureaucracy.
And so the stalemate continues.
According to news reports this weekend, final allocations of missing teaching posts should be made by mid-week next week.
2014 has already been condemned by teachers, parents and local authorities as “the worst start to the academic year in recent history”.
As to the announcement that extra classes will be laid on to make up for all the lost time, the National Independent Confederation of Parents is not holding its breath.
Said president Isabel Gregório children have already been badly compromised by the failure of the system and she is not at all confident that “compensation classes” will make things up.
