Education in Portugal

Central organization Our Educational System is Central and the ministry decides about the curriculums.

Kindergarden – Not compulsory. The ages are between 3-6. First Cycle – Ages 6-10, compulsory. The most part of the time the pupils have just one teacher. They start to learn English compulsory on the 3rd level, with an English teacher. Second Cycle – ages 10-12. They start to have different teachers from different subjects.

Third Cycle – They start to learn another foreign language (choose between French, Spanish or German). Secondary – They can choose between 4 different areas: Sciences; Arts; Economics; Languages and Social studies. University

If the students fails and decide don´t go to the normal studies they can decide another way of keep going on. In spite of, they can start this on second cycle, is more normal start it on the third one.

Third cycle - Educational and professional graduation. They finish the studies with two diplomas (third cycle and professional, level 3)

Secondary - Educational and professional graduation. They can choose two different ways: Vocational or Professional

Vocational – Two years. They finish the secondary school and also have a professional diploma, level 4.

Vocational – If they want to continue studies they can go to professional courses at university and changes their professional diploma to level 5. After that, they can continue studies and start a university course in the area of their professional skills.

Professional – Three years Professional – Three years. They finish the secondary school and also have a professional diploma, level 4.

Professional – If they want to continue studies they can do in in two different ways: 1 - Go to professional courses at university and changes their professional diploma to level 5; After that they can continue studies and start a university course in the area of their professional skills; 2 – Do exams that the university wants and enter in a university course.

Our School

We are on of the 15 schools in Portugal which have accept the decentralization of educational field. So we can decide 25% of the Curriculum by ourselves. Normally, we use this to leads with the real problems of our students (integration, special needs, social and familiar problems, …) We also use to support them in their studies (math's, languages, sciences, …)

We are in the beginning of the process and we decide implement a study teachers group to decide what we can do in the future. This school concept is quite knew for us and we are doing the first steps.

In our school we have a good educational and pedagogical climate, because we are a small school with not so many teachers. We only have punctual cases of indiscipline and not very big, so we can handle it in a easy way. Our biggest problem is the families environment, we have many children's with social needs. We try to handle this with some strategic partnerships with authorities, hospitals, social workers, …