In the previous century, the world was not looking to Portugal as a blueprint for educational excellence. Illiteracy was rampant, and in 1952 only 6 per cent of children had completed three years of compulsory education.

But in the 21st century Portugal is being hailed as a beacon of inclusion, with a 2022 report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development stating that the country has made “important progress in establishing a strong framework for inclusive education that is focused on responding to the needs of all students”.

So, what has happened?

For years, Portugal’s education system struggled under the authoritarian Estado Novo regime that ruled the country for four decades. In 1940 only 56 per cent of children aged 7-14 were classed as literate, increasing to 77 per cent in 1950.

The 1970s brought revolution to the country, along with many migrants from its former colonies, creating a linguistically diverse school population that required thoughtful approaches to inclusion, explains Dr Ines Alves, senior lecturer in inclusive education at the University of Glasgow.

Inclusion without labels

But Portugal’s commitment to inclusive education was really cemented in 1991 with landmark legislation that said students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) should be educated in mainstream schools, rather than via the previous patchwork of mainstream and medicalised specialist provision.

This attempt at a fully inclusive system was undermined by controversial legislation in 2008, which aimed to promote personalised approaches but was ultimately criticised for relying too heavily on medical categorisation and struggling to fully integrate specialised support into mainstream settings.

Then came the radical shift: a 2018 framework that explicitly rejected the notion that any categorisation was necessary for intervention in SEND.

This framework, which remains in place today, defines inclusive education as a commitment to the idea that all students can reach the competencies outlined in Unesco’s Students’ Profile by the End of Compulsory Schooling, even if they require significantly differentiated pathways to get there.

The aim of this, Alves explains, was to solidify inclusion not just as a policy but as a universal principle for schooling, “where all kinds of diversity should be seen as a positive thing” and the place for every child is within their local, mainstream school.

“With the previous policy, schools were asking parents to have a medical certificate that said, ‘My child has this and so they are entitled to have special support,’” Alves says. “Whereas now the policy says that you don’t need to categorise to intervene. If a child has difficulties, you just need to do something about it, rather than waiting for somebody to sign a document saying you need to do something about it.”

‘If a child has difficulties, you just need to do something about it, rather than waiting for somebody to sign a document’

So, what does that actually look like in classrooms? The legislation has introduced a tiered system of responses for students with SEND: universal, selective and additional.

“The idea is that the universal is just good pedagogy for all,” Alves continues. “And then you’ve got selective, where you’ve got some changes [through differentiation] for students who need it, and then there’s additional, where you can have quite a different curriculum for a child.”

Exact inclusion arrangements vary by school and need, Alves explains. For example, a student with more complex autism may participate in regular classes some of the time but be educated within an internal unit of a mainstream school the rest of the time.

There are also still some special education settings in the country, she says, though these are “very few” and normally have charitable status.

Professor Manuela Sanches-Ferreira is teacher coordinator at the school of education at the Polytechnic Institute of Porto and coordinator of the master’s degree in special education: cognition and profound disabilities. She explains that the policy has brought a shift in both mindset and responsibility.

“Teachers are encouraged to look at students under the perspective of the support they need to participate and achieve their potential, rather than their deficits and what they can’t do,” she explains. “This intensifies the responsibility of the school and, particularly, of mainstream education teachers in responding to all students.”

But, Alves says, the openness of the policy means there’s “a lot left to the school to decide”, which can bring confusion as well as autonomy.

“What can happen in practice is that then you have teachers who get it, who are really responsive, who will feel that it’s their job and will do everything they can to look for answers, whereas others will just say they don’t know what to do,” she explains.

Resourcing issues

One of the key resources for teachers is supposed to be the multidisciplinary inclusion team, which is mandated by the 2018 policy to be present in every cluster of schools (Portuguese schools of different stages in the same area are grouped together and share some administration and management).

These teams are made up of staff including teachers, psychologists, social workers and other health professionals, and they are responsible for the identification of students requiring support, as well as the implementation and monitoring of support measures.

Ultimately, Alves says, their role is to “empower mainstream teachers to educate inclusively” through supported pedagogical differentiation.

But, Sanches-Ferreira adds, while the shift in approach means that teacher training is now “fostering a graduate teacher profile aligned with the concept of a school that serves all students”, the ever-thorny issue of resource scarcity remains.

“There is still a lack of resources, namely special education teachers, specialised technicians, operational assistants and psychologists,” she says. And for such an ambitious policy to work, “it is necessary to ensure that schools have access, without restrictions, to these resources”.

This is causing concern among staff, Alves explains, with a sense that they are “never fully prepared for the diversity in the classroom”.

“What we need to do is to prepare student teachers to see themselves as lifelong learners, because every year they might have one child with a syndrome that they’ve never heard of and you can’t really go through all the different aspects [of all possible SEND needs] within initial teacher education,” she says.

Another key shift towards giving schools the autonomy to be more inclusive is the power granted to school clusters in the 2018 legislation to rework up to a quarter of the national curriculum based on student need.

It’s a move designed to facilitate greater interdisciplinary and project-based work, as well as give schools the ability to create new locally relevant learning areas. So a school cluster in a coastal community where many students will enter the fishing industry, for example, may adjust the curriculum to focus on the mathematical and scientific elements of the profession, while a cluster in a region facing challenges with youth identity or community engagement might use the 25 per cent flexibility to support inclusion by reallocating time to work on an interdisciplinary module about the local area and its history.

Problems in practice

The vision of deeply personalised and locally relevant learning for all students is a noble one, but there are questions over how well it is truly being implemented in practice, explains Catarina Neto, a PhD student in public policy at the University Institute of Lisbon.

She points to a 2024 survey from the National Federation of Education (FNE) teaching union in which 56 per cent of respondents said they felt the legislation had significantly increased bureaucratic work for teachers, while many believed that it had simply not improved learning. Respondents noted the lack of specialist support, and issues around how long it takes often-overwhelmed multidisciplinary teams to respond to requests.

The FNE union is now pushing for a review of the legislation, while arguing for more time for collaborative work and fewer teaching hours to enable the needs of students to be met more effectively.

“The biggest problem, and not only for SEND, is the fact that several teams or teachers change every year, making it difficult in many cases to be consistent in practice,” Neto says.

‘The biggest problem is that several teams or teachers change every year, making it difficult to be consistent in practice’

The 2022 OECD report similarly highlighted ongoing challenges in implementation, particularly regarding outcomes for students from disadvantaged and diverse backgrounds, specifically those from low-income families, immigrant backgrounds and Roma communities, who are still lower-attaining than their peers. And there are questions over general monitoring of effectiveness, Sanches-Ferreira explains.

“Comparative data between schools for students with selective and additional measures is lacking, and the criteria determining when students should receive selective or additional measures remain unclear,” she says.

“There is also an absence of alternative assessment methods, particularly for students requiring additional support, that could capture the full range of learning opportunities available across schools. In short, no qualitative or quantitative assessment mechanism currently exists to effectively monitor this impact.”

It’s a complex picture, albeit one that has come from a determination for positive change. The country’s journey towards a progressive, rights-based model for inclusion has understandably earned international recognition for its stance that all students belong in mainstream schools and that intervention should be based on the support needed, not the medical labels applied.

But bridging the gap between this advanced legal framework and daily classroom reality is a big challenge, it seems. That’s something to bear in mind here in the UK, as schools await the government’s now-delayed White Paper, which is set to outline plans for reforming England’s SEND system.

While Portugal has succeeded in creating a radical vision, where diversity is seen as a positive asset and the curriculum is flexible enough to meet local needs, the question is whether it can find the investment and structural clarity to ensure that this is actually translated into improved learning and equity for all.

Zofia Niemtus is a freelance writer

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