Portugal likes to look at the educational system as one of the most effective social elevators in the post-25th of April period, but today we know, however, that the elevator is increasingly conditioned. Or, better yet, that there are different elevators, with different capacities and different accesses to higher floors, with rooftops exclusive, which cannot be accessed without a premium card.
In fact, the idea of an educational system that provides equal access and opportunities has suffered a setback that brings it closer to the dimension of utopia and the evident signs of this distortion are accumulating, with expression at the various levels of Education, from Pre-school to the commercialization of access to Higher Education, with unbalanced rules that are difficult to correct.
Last week, a new study, promoted by the La Caixa Foundation and BPI, on the tutoring market, added some more relevant data to this debate. In Portugal, around 20% of students (one in five) attend tutoring. In high school, this proportion rises to around one in three. In total, families spend close to 300 million euros per year on this educational support.
Often, these extra classes are a legitimate response to students’ difficulties. Others, the issue is on another level: those who can afford more support have more instruments to improve school results. The study shows that families with greater financial comfort resort more to private lessons and spend, on average, around 30% more than families with fewer resources, who make a significant effort to guarantee this support for their children, often at the expense of other expenses. Therefore, unequal access.
If we add to this the use of private education in high school by some families to guarantee better averages and better preparation for exams, the picture becomes clearer. The truth is that those who have more resources can accumulate several advantages: from choosing schools that historically have higher internal rankings to opting for individual tutoring in decisive subjects or specific preparation for national exams (which is why 31% of students resort to tutoring, according to the study). Now, in a system where access to Higher Education depends on the high school average and exams, these advantages count. Very.
This does not mean that the Portuguese educational system is no longer an instrument of social mobility. But the warning signs are piling up and the public school crisis only accentuates them. The reality is that academic success is increasingly linked to the ability to pay for access to certain elevators in the educational system. And so, the risk is clear: the educational system may continue to present itself as meritocratic, but in practice it reproduces, or even amplifies, the inequalities that it should help reduce.
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