Around 40 people, most of them non-teaching staff, gathered in Coimbra today in a protest called by the Union of All Education Professionals (Stop), which advocates reversing municipalization in the sector.
Around 40 people gathered today in front of the National Association of Portuguese Municipalities (ANMP) to demand that the country’s municipalities speak out against the municipalization of education.
“What’s at stake here is that, with the new government, the municipalities can no longer remain silent in the face of the municipalization that went ahead under the previous government and that the majority of municipalities didn’t agree with,” Stop coordinator André Pestana told reporters.
According to the union leader, Stop had already requested a meeting with the ANMP in the past, but never received “any kind of response”.
With this in mind, the union has decided to call a sit-in for today to “demand the reversal of municipalization” and defend “the enhancement of the careers of all non-teaching staff and the opening of vacancies in the ranks for senior and specialized technicians,” he added.
For André Pestana, the advance of municipalization, initiated by the previous executive, will accentuate the asymmetries already felt in the country’s schools.
“A council like Oeiras, which has much more money than a municipality in the interior, will have” the capacity to “provide more learning conditions for children, to the detriment of poorer municipalities,” he said.
The Stop leader believes that it is essential to defend “the quality of education throughout the country, from north to south, from the interior to the coast”.
At the meeting with the new Minister of Education, Fernando Alexandre, Stop will discuss municipalization, since the government “doesn’t question this process” and, “unfortunately, now in the recently presented program, even talks about moving forward”.
André Pestana told reporters that at this meeting he also intends to address issues such as a minimum increase of 120 euros for all workers in the sector, the evaluation system, as well as the concern about being able to move forward with “an attempt to restructure and bring together the 1st and 2nd cycles”.
For the leader, this is an “economic measure to reduce the number of teachers required” in schools.
