Marcos Santos / USP Images
They didn’t have a teacher during part of the school year but the weight of the exam in the final grade is the same. It’s a question of “social justice”.
The Government continues without disclosing the scale of a visible problem in education in Portugal: the number of students without classes.
Since January, it has been mandatory to record summaries of all classes to monitor the number of students without a teacher in real time. But official numbers have not yet been released.
According to the National Federation of Teachers (FENPROF), in January there was almost 160 thousand students without at least one teacher.
This problem lasts for months in several schools, in many classes, among thousands of students – who, when they take the exam (9th, 11th and 12th years), see the exam have the weight it has for other students which have teachers in all subjects throughout the school year.
Filinto Lima, president of the National Association of Directors of Groups and Public Schools (ANDAEP), thinks that students without teachers should be compensated.
It is a matter of “social justice”, he claims, in the following: the number of affected students and the subjects involved in each school should be counted, in addition to how many classes are missing. It is “easy at an administrative level” accounting, he assures.
“These children will be evaluated like others, with the disadvantage that the absence of teachers causes them. It should be a priority to find a solution for these students. They are students who are not as well prepared and this lack of teachers has to be considered in the classification of students”.
Therefore, one of the solutions could be “the exams have a different weighting in the final classification of each subject” – which is 30% in the 9th year (Portuguese and Mathematics), while in high school the exam counts for 25% of the final grade.
This measure, he argues, is urgent, especially for students who did not have classes in some subjects, throughout the first period of this academic year.
But, recognizes Filinto Lima, schools make a “great effort to guarantee teachers for students in exam years”.
MEP disagrees
The Public School Mission (MEP) would invest more in extra classes for students who do not have teachers in a particular subject.
If exams counted one way for some students and another way for others, it would be a way of “aggravate existing inequalities”according to spokesperson Cristina Mota, who considers that the exams are a way of maintaining equity.
