The Minister of Education João Costa (1972) is one of those responsible for the Copernican turn that education in Portugal has experienced both as Secretary of State (2015-2021) and as minister, appointed last year. The country emerged from the dictatorship (1974) with a very low level of qualifications, with a part of the population illiterate and very high school dropout rates. Even in 1992, half of the students left school. Successive governments have managed to turn it around and today, Portugal enjoys the best European parameters. Its dropout rate is almost negligible (6%).
The day before the crisis broke out in the Portuguese government, with the resignation of the prime minister, Minister Costa gave a conference at the Cercle d’Economía during the call for the Ensenyament 2024 award. In it he outlined the keys to success: starting schooling as soon as possible (promote 0-3 years), extend compulsory education until age 18, integrate all minors into the classroom without exclusion, free extracurricular activities, promote training for unqualified adults so that they raise the expectations of their children… “It has not been a miracle as the press calls it but a task that has involved a lot of planning, effort and budget,” he warns.
In Spain, each Government wants its educational law. How did you achieve consensus?
All parties shared the concern about the low school results and the need for the social function of the school to be fulfilled. We know that more education, more employment, more wages, more innovation, better health, more democratic robustness. That brought us together.
Compulsory education until the age of 18 was agreed.
We set the age of 18, with itineraries starting at age 15 (academic, arts, FP), with the express purpose that these young people would want to continue training. We launched a huge national debate about what skills were needed and how we could improve the experience of education as we forced them to be in school. A work group identified them (critical thinking, problem solving, working as a team).
And they changed the curriculum.
At the same time we approved very ambitious legislation on inclusion. We are all different, we have different learning rates and it is necessary to respond to those needs with the curriculum.
Is there a double curriculum? One broad and the other essential?
Our system suffered from “curricular obesity”, many subjects, with a lot of content and with a certain pressure from the academic world. But in the classroom there are faster students and others with more difficulties and if I have a very extensive curriculum I cannot work with the latter. With the associations we define the essential learning for each discipline and then each teacher can choose extensions, customizations, and work together with other subjects.
Have standards dropped?
No no. What was done was to identify a common corpus and from there the school makes its choices. A lame person, like me, cannot be evaluated in physical education in the same way as others. This is often confused – there is some disagreement here with the right – with lowering standards. My answer is always the same. There is nothing easier than saying “you can’t do it, quit.” Inclusion is much more difficult: it requires more resources, money and is more demanding.
Didn’t the scientific societies protest?
They all agreed that the study plan was extensive, but none of them wanted to cut their discipline.
Competencies, not just content, are taught to students who would have previously been excluded, and teachers are compelled to cooperate. It’s not much?
Teaching is much more difficult now. It is one thing to know the positions of the chords (‘knowledge’) and another to interpret (‘skills’). The teacher is not the only source of information but information is not knowledge. It is easier to teach historical facts than to work on the interpretation of the present in light of knowledge of history. In the Israel-Hamas conflict, knowledge of international relations, economics, and geography must be used to understand, analyze the comments on the subject, and form an informed opinion.
Evaluating by competencies is also difficult.
I return to the guitar. If they give me a multiple choice exam on chords, I will get a good grade. Evaluating interpretation is different, it requires more time. I believe, and this has been our path, in gradual and progressive changes. We have a school organized as in the 19th century, and now it must be organized in an interdisciplinary way.
Here there is some resistance to working by areas.
We must let the schools speak, give them a voice and show that it is possible to develop the curriculum in different ways. It will have, little by little, a contagious effect. All over the world there is a lot of resistance from teachers to working in areas. Educational systems are inherently conservative, which is interesting because school should be the space for innovation.
How do you approach inclusion?
The first year the schools debated the concept and the difference between integrating (everyone being in a classroom) and including (educating based on the student). We invest in non-teaching educational personnel such as social workers, social educators. Now we are in a more difficult moment, which is working on inclusive practices. We do not want it to remain in the classroom but rather to be the responsibility of all school staff.
In Catalonia we have low reading comprehension, like you in 2000. What did you do?
The country was in a state of shock upon learning the results. We saw that the students’ difficulties were not in reading narratives but in reading informative texts. The classes ranged from the medieval songbook to contemporary authors, now other genres are included. It was a measure, and still is, quite controversial. A reading plan and the school library network were also promoted. Now, we have the challenge at higher levels of competition. Our aspiration is not to stop; Don’t say “that’s it.”
How did they do all this educational reform?
Once we had the strategic objective, we shared it with the schools and trusted them. In 2001, if you asked a school director what the dropout rate was at his school, he would not know because it was normal for students to drop out. Then we asked them to align with our objectives and design their own strategies.
It would go hand in hand with the investment.
The Government’s commitment is very relevant, which has translated into a 44% increase in investment in 8 years. The growth of the Portuguese economy has helped us. The planned budget in 2024 is 8.5 billion.
What other objectives did you have in this transformation?
The third pillar, after the curriculum and inclusion, was education for citizenship, very much in line with the sustainable development goals of the United Nations and with a conviction, which not everyone shares, which is to have students in school today. who come out of 12 years of schooling and who are not able to interpret the world around them, but they are going to receive false information, fake news, pseudoscience. The challenges of sustainability, financial literacy, multiculturalism and gender equality – which has been one of the most controversial issues in Portugal – cannot be left out of school and are in the curriculum.
Do you no longer have a schedule divided into subjects?
What we have given schools is the freedom, either during the year, or during certain periods of the year, to work together across subjects and revitalize theme-based or project-based learning. There are very interesting experiences, such as philosophy and biology, to work on bioethics in relation to drug development. The big issues of our society are not disciplinary, they are multidisciplinary.
Do you also have a vocations crisis?
Yes, this also happens in other countries. And what we have done in this new legislation, which will come into force next year, is to guarantee the attractiveness of training by paying for internship periods. The interns will have a paid work contract. In addition, short training periods will be offered to those who want to be teachers and have advanced training such as scientific master’s degrees, doctorates.
Do universities help?
There is great collaboration between universities and schools, between the training that takes place in training centers and the role of universities in supporting schools. In continuing training, requests increase if the courses are given by university professors.
Does the Government define training?
Centers and teachers can choose, but there are also national programs (on student profiles, curricular flexibility, mathematics teaching, digital skills, promotion of school success, with strategies of recognized effectiveness. These programs are defined centrally and we train trainers so that they cascade.
Can directors select their team in some way?
At the beginning of the year I tried to give more autonomy to the management. This sparked a huge wave of protests, which are still ongoing. I still believe that it would be a good measure for the schools, but I abandoned that intention in order to reach an agreement with the unions, which did not happen.
Teachers in your country are protesting. They demand more salary and more recognition. Are you exhausted from implementing these measures?
No, the claim is a salary issue, the recovery of cuts from a very hard period that affected all public administration careers. A part has been returned but the rest is not financially sustainable, especially because it is not a specific issue for teachers. However, we have worked to reduce precariousness. This year alone we have hired 8,000 teachers at a time, the largest number of hires in recent history. And we are introducing other changes to make the career more attractive to younger people. But we don’t have the ability to go back in time and pretend that the troika period didn’t happen. On the other hand, the age of the teachers is advanced. And that leads to fatigue. And this generation of teachers has gone through very hard times. They entered their career with an expectation and the retirement age has been increasing all these years, like that of the entire population.
He affirms that education is the guardian of democracy, but the militancy that grows the most among young people is that of extreme right-wing parties when this is the best educated generation in history.
Far-right parties feed on simplifications of the complex, they grow easily on social networks. Democracy is built on dialogue, consensus, debate. Therefore, it is incompatible with a culture of immediacy. And in school we learn to develop the ability to understand what is complex and to have multiple perspectives. A school that fosters democracy takes time and intention. This is why we have approved integrating a media literacy strategy into our National Reading Plan to combat fake news, hate speech and populism through literacy.
What do you expect from the PISA Report that will be released in December?
I expect worse results, because it is the PISA of the pandemic. It would be very strange if, after two years of school closures, everything had improved. We have to look at whether the fall has been generalized and how the leading group has behaved. It would be interesting to try to understand if there are correlations between the time and duration of school closures and outcomes. I think we still don’t know enough about the impact of the pandemic. That is why we have to work on many fronts (emotional well-being, social inequality) and invest a lot in learning more.
