The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Structural Reform Support (DG Reform) has selected the Agency to support Portugal within the European Union’s Structural Reform Support Programme (SRSP).
This builds on the collaborations between DG Reform and the Agency to provide tailor-made support to four other Ministries to make their education systems more inclusive.
The Ministry of Education of Portugal has committed to design a monitoring system to assess the effectiveness of its new law to promote inclusiveness in school education (Decree-Law No. 54/2018, July 6). DG Reform and the Agency will support the Ministry to achieve this ambitious goal. They will provide specific technical knowledge to design the monitoring system and indicators relevant to both the Portuguese education sector in general (schools, teachers, parents) and the national administration in particular.
The work will be carried out in four phases:
- Inception
- Information collection and analysis
- Recommendation of a monitoring system
- Piloting indicators and final reporting.
Throughout these phases, national and local stakeholders in education, including decision-makers, teachers, learners and parents, will be asked to reflect on the current provision and identify its strengths and weaknesses. The Agency will compare these reflections with the indicators to determine how far the current provision meets the requirements of the Decree-Law. The Agency will also make recommendations for improvements.
Work started with a kick-off meeting on 19 June and a fact-finding meeting on 24 June, both of which took place online. The fact-finding meeting involved representatives from the Agency, DG Reform and the Portuguese Ministry of Education. Ministry representatives included the Secretary of State, João Costa, who welcomed all participants. The DG Reform team leader, Patricia Perez-Gomez, described the relevance of the activities in the framework of the European Union. Agency representatives outlined the methodology and the group discussed the aims of the Decree-Law and the outline and timeline of the SRSP activities.
The work will continue with an online technical meeting with representatives from key services in education.