Following news from the last few months of last year revealing that schools were experiencing great troubles in finding new teachers, we can report that students from schools in the Algarve and Greater Lisbon continue without having all necessary teachers at the start of the second term, which began this week for primary and secondary education.
The data stems from a study presented on the blog of Professor Arlindo Ferreira, a specialist in Education Statistics, which was released earlier today. According to the study, in the second term period the problem still hasn’t faded away for students in the Algarve and Lisbon, the two regions most greatly affected by a lack of teachers.
In the municipality of Lisbon, there were still 172 empty teaching positions of eight or more hours, followed by Sintra (125 schedules), Seixal (68 schedules), Cascais (67 schedules), Almada (61) and Amadora (59) .
A number of Algarvean municipalities also appear in the list of municipalities with the most hiring problems. The schools with the most difficulty in hiring teachers in the region are Olhão and Silves, where some schools are lacking up to 34% of teaching staff.
The difficulty in hiring teachers for schools in areas of Lisbon and the Algarve is a problem that has been made apparent to the Ministry of Education, which has already announced that it is looking into ways to encourage teachers to accept positions in these places. However, whilst the ministry attempts to think of a solution, thousands of students are being left without a proper education.
The low wages associated with the positions and the high rental costs of homes in these two regions of the country have been cited as the main reasons for declining position acceptance rates in these schools. Aggravating this situation is the aging of the faculty: Over the next four years, around 18,000 teachers currently working in schools are set to retire.
