Government proposes that recovery of teachers’ service time advances in September | Teachers

The Government’s proposal presented to teachers’ unions foresees that the recovery of service time will begin on September 1st and will be paid in tranches of 20% throughout the legislature. The doubt created last week is thus resolved, after the Minister of Finance admitted that the return of this time to teachers could only happen in 2025.

The announcement was made, this Friday, by the general secretary of the National Federation of Teachers (Fenprof), Mário Nogueira, after leaving the first negotiation meeting on the topic at the Ministry of Education. Two more meetings are already scheduled for May 13th and 21st.

“I would say that the two red lines that we had placed — which was whether [a recuperação] if it didn’t start this year and if it didn’t end by 2028, they are outdated”, noted Mário Nogueira. However, the hard work starts now. Fenprof will work on the Government’s proposal, knowing from now on that the union platform would like 30% of frozen service time to be recovered this year – and for this return to be completed within three years. And that mechanisms are also created to compensate teachers who have since retired.

There are also other matters present in the proposal presented by the ministerial team that Fenprof said it disagreed with, starting with the maintenance of access vacancies to the 5th and 7th levels. “This means that many teachers who will be recovering their service time will lose more service time because they will remain stuck in vacancies without being able to progress. And that, for us, is not acceptable”, noted the secretary general.

Another aspect with which the union platform does not agree is the proposed repeal of decree-law no. 74/2023, which implemented mechanisms to accelerate the career progression of early childhood educators and primary and secondary school teachers. It was created by the previous executive, precisely to respond to the inequalities generated by the freezing of careers between 2011 and 2017.

“If the vacancy regime is already unfair, and is already a funnel to prevent normal progression, with this revocation, we will have an even more negative situation”, he noted.

For this negotiating calendar, the Government proposed the discussion of two topics: the recovery of teachers’ service time and exceptional measures to overcome the difficulties of the lack of teachers.

According to Fenprof, there are around 30 thousand without classes in at least one subject. And the expectation is that the next academic year will start with similar problems, since, throughout this year, it is expected that around five thousand teachers will retire — and only a thousand will enter the profession.

The union platform also wanted to include the discussion of measures to enhance the profession, whether combating precariousness or enhancing the career, as well as mobility due to illness.