“The President of the Republic has enacted the decree creating the Education, Quality and Evaluation Institute, I. P., and approves the respective organization, dissolving the Institute of Educational Evaluation, I. P., the Directorate-General for Education, the Mission Structure of the National Reading Plan, and the Coordinating Office of the School Libraries Network”, reads a note published today on the Presidency’s website.
In the same note, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa expresses hope that this “merger achieves the intended objectives and does not raise issues, in terms of effectiveness, in two fundamental areas such as reading and school libraries.”
In late July, the Government announced a reform in the Ministry of Education, Science, and Innovation, with the dissolution of ten entities and the creation of three new structures, one of which is the Education, Quality and Evaluation Institute, which will now incorporate the Directorate-General for Education, the National Reading Plan, the School Libraries Network, and the Institute of Educational Evaluation.
In August, following criticism, the Ministry of Education assured the continuation of the projects of the National Reading Plan and the National School Libraries Network.
“The current functions of the Mission Structure of the National Reading Plan (PNL) and the Coordinating Office of the School Libraries Network (RBE) will be integrated into the new Education, Quality and Evaluation Institute, continuing the respective PNL and RBE projects to promote reading,” indicated the ministry led by Fernando Alexandre at the time.
The RBE program was created in 1996 to “install and develop libraries in public schools at all teaching levels, providing users with the necessary resources for reading, access, use, and production of information in analog, electronic, and digital formats.”
The PNL was launched a decade later as an “institutional response to the concern over literacy levels of the population in general and particularly young people, significantly below the European average,” according to the Council of Ministers’ resolution that created it.
