Education in Portugal: a closer look at secondary education through the numbers of schools and students enrolled in it

Abstract

Getting to know the current panorama of the Portuguese Education system requires an attentive look at the last decade and the events that characterised the Portuguese political, economic and social scene over that period. The impact of the measures resulting from the Program of Financial Assistance to Portugal, between 2011 and 2014, on the Education sector were analysed in this study, whose focus was the number of public Secondary Education Schools and that of students enrolled in the same cycle of studies, from 2008 to 2016, according to data retrieved from Pordata. Implementing a correlational study, based on bivariate analysis and using a Pearson correlation test supported the process of getting to the correlation coefficient between the variables studied. It is clear that, despite the several austerity measures applied to the Education sector in Portugal, there has been no significant variation between the number of Public Secondary Schools and the number of students enrolled in this cycle all over the period in analysis. Nevertheless, there is a high negative correlation between the same variables regarding their progression rates, with the number of schools showing an evolutionary progress and the number of students enrolled in the secondary cycle tending to decrease.