Schoolchildren in the 4th and 6th years (mainly from ages 9-11) “have a lot of difficulty in understanding and producing texts in Portuguese, and also in reasoning and the resolution of problems in Mathematics”.
This is the opening sentence of a text in Correio da Manhã today, referring to the assessment tests (ModA) held in May of this year.
The paper heads the story “Children with ‘horrible’ results in Portuguese, stressing teachers found them ‘frightening’, and “do not have hopes for improvement”.
The global averages, albeit they do show a slight improvement on the equally dismal results of 2025, sit at around the 50 out of 100 mark, while overall analysis, says the paper, shows “serious problems”.
“The worst results are in the production of texts by pupils in the 6th year whose average mark is a negative, in spite of having moved up from 45 last year to 47.9 this year,” Portuguese teacher Maria do Carmo Oliveira of the Association of Portuguese teachers explains. “Comprehension of texts also has an average in negative territory, dropping from 51.4 last year to 49.5.
“Also, for 4th year pupils, the global average fell in comprehension from 53.7 to 51.8,” she added, describing the results as “horrible” and “absolutely frightening”.
They are “the result of an education policy in which children are taught with minimalist guidance documents, ‘the Essential Learning Outcomes’, and suffer a growing influence of technologies which take away skills needed for more traditional forms of learning, meaning they understand and perform less well”.
The Portuguese teacher also cited the “influence of many children from Brazil and the PALOP countries (Portuguese-speaking African countries) – for which school is very tough – who have to take the same tests, but who “cannot understand like Portuguese children”.
Maria do Carmo Oliveira does not see the situation improving, says CM.
“Understanding texts is an essential for any citizen. If they cannot understand at 11, will they understand at 17? The results of PISA have already shown that our pupils are roughly a year and a half behind (the European norm) in reading. This is not going to improve, because schools do not have resources; they do not find solutions – and the pupils are lost.”
The teacher added that these kind of skills “need to be worked on in the home (…) in school it is very hard. Pupils are difficult, their capacity to focus and pay attention is extremely limited, and they don’t want to because they don’t want to work hard.”
An indictment on the system could barely be worse.
CM then outlines further (poor) results in other areas, adding that the Ministry of Education “justified the situation with problems coming from the correction of national exams”, an excuse that barely makes sense in that the problems with the correction of national exams applied to pupils in secondary education (3º cycle), and these results refer to the 1st and 2nd cycles.
Regarding the chaos of the country’s first year of digital marking, the Public School Mission has already questioned the ministry over plans for next year, stressing it hopes there will not be a repeat of issues experienced this year. The mission wants to know if digital marking is to stay in place, and if so how, and where: will there remain one sole centre for digitalisation, or will there be centres created elsewhere?
Source: Correio da Manhã