Education Minister wants affordable housing for teachers

The Education Minister said this Saturday in Torres Vedras that he is working on measures to address the teacher shortage, such as affordable housing for laid-off teachers and paid internships for undergraduates.

“We are also going to work with the Social Insurance Fund, which also has buildings in Lisbon, and are applying to turn them into affordable rental premises for teachers,” João Costa told reporters on the sidelines of the Centro Escolar opening. to Ramalhal, in the municipality of Torres Vedras.

The government official added that the ministries of education and housing are also working to “start providing more and more affordable accommodation opportunities,” acknowledging that “housing prices in Lisbon are beyond the reach of anyone.”

Last academic year, the guardianship announced the first competition for the allocation of apartments in Portimão and Lisbon, admitting that “there are still too few” for the needs.

João Costa has announced that the ministry will “soon” make changes to the public consultation teacher training model, bringing back paid internships for students in their second year of a master’s degree in teaching.

Other “more intensive teaching methods” are also planned for licensed teachers without teacher training.

“It doesn’t make sense to have them go back to the beginning of the journey, to the beginning of their degree, so we’re also going to optimize the teaching methods to be able to accelerate those learning pathways,” he explained.

According to a government official, the teacher shortage “is a local problem” in the south of the country, where “teacher training that remained in the north of the country has been significantly dismantled in recent decades.”

“We are working with the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education to enable universities to have more places for Masters in teaching because, contrary to what has been said, which is that no one wants to be a teacher, we there is a need for very large number of master’s degrees in teaching, and universities do not have the capacity to meet the existing demand,” explained João Costa.

In Lisbon, he explained, one of the universities with a master’s degree in teaching opened 15 vacancies and accepted 90 candidates.

In the short term, he explained, authorities are reducing the time it takes to replace teachers, speeding up hiring in schools when that is not possible, changing pay levels and allowing positions to be filled by recently graduated teachers with whom they were not competing in the labor market. recent competitions or were not professionalized “as a last resort.”