The increasing number of teacher retirements is creating difficulties in the regular functioning of the education system and even the North area, until recently “immune” to the serious lack of teachers that affects the South of the country, is showing signs of major constraints.
To DN, Arlindo Ferreira, director of the Cego do Maio school group, Póvoa de Varzim, and author of the blog “ArLindo” (dedicated to Education), is concerned about the situation. “I’ll give you an example, there is a school in Póvoa that has 12th year students without a Portuguese teacher for a month and there is no prospect of getting a teacher to accompany these students. These are students who are going to take a national exam. This was ‘normal’ in Lisbon and not in the North. It has implications for several fundamental subjects and secondary exams”, he explained this Saturday, February 28, to DN.
Retirements, he says, are one of the causes, but not the only one. The official recalls that this is a structural problem, which is no longer limited to the south of the country. Next Monday, at the beginning of a new month, schools will have 250 fewer teachers due to retirement (see below).
It is worth remembering that, when the teacher competition for the 2025-2026 school year was published, Arlindo Ferreira had already warned of the anticipated difficulties in replacing teachers. This is because, after the placements of permanent teachers, there were 20,060 contracted teachers left to place throughout the school year. These teachers are the ones who ensure replacements due to sick leave or retirement. “It’s a smaller number than in other years. There were already 40 thousand. Meanwhile, it dropped to 30 thousand, but this is the lowest number in the last many years”, he said.
FENPROF has also warned of the escalating problem of teacher shortages. At the end of the 1st period, the union reported that it had been “contracting 13,446 school hours, which corresponds to more than 174,000 hours of teaching, when, in the same period of the previous school year, this number was 9696 hours”. “This is a significant increase (38.7%), which reflects a deep structural problem that worsens from week to week: the chronic lack of teachers, with the consequent permanent existence of many thousands of students without classes”, he assured, in a statement.
The official number of students without classes this academic year is not known. The Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation (MECI) is implementing a new way of doing this count, but there is still no scheduled date for its release.
Retirements growing in recent years
2013 (year with the highest number of renovations) – 4628
2014 – 1127
2015 –1280
2016 – 623
2017 – 755
2018 – 669
2019 – 1409
2020 – 1649
2021 – 1944
2022 – 2401
2023 – 3521
2024 – 3981
2025 – 3623
2026 (first three months of the year) – 672
These numbers only reflect the departure of teachers who subscribed to Caixa Geral de Aposentações. The Social Security register is not public and, therefore, the number of retired teachers may be even higher.
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