Luís Montenegro stated in Setúbal that public school has lost quality and rigor in recent years, supporting the diagnosis with the results of the PISA 2025 report. The prime minister announced a 170 million euro package to modernize 35 schools in the Setúbal Peninsula, funded by a one billion euro line contracted with the European Investment Bank, and a plan to attract 600 teachers with monthly subsidies of 500 euros for teachers placed far from their family area of residence.
The operationalization of the program does not go through the scrutiny of the Assembly of the Republic, being a matter of credit contracting and discretionary allocation of funds by the Executive. However, constitutional law experts warn that implementation depends on annual budget allocation in the State Budget and the audit of the Court of Auditors, and that any structural reform of the education system runs into the Parliament's legislative competence reserve.
The teacher shortage persists as a structural problem, with Montenegro admitting that integrating more than three thousand teachers into public school positions "is still not enough." Data cited in the article reveals that only 13 percent of Portuguese students attend schools whose principals guarantee there is no teacher shortage, in contrast to the 29 percent OECD average.
Unions and parent associations criticize the lack of legislative scheduling for the measures and of statutory instruments for medium-term human resources planning. Education assessment experts also contest the political appropriation of PISA data, recalling that it is a sample-based test subject to socioeconomic variables and that the assessed students were not affected by recent curricular reforms, making immediate correlations with short-term decisions unviable.
