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The national secondary education exams will continue, this academic year, to serve only as entrance exams for higher education. The information was given by the Minister of Education, João Costa, at the end of a hearing in the Parliamentary Committee on Education, which took place this Wednesday.
In response to questions from the PSD, the minister justified this decision with the need not to cause “disruptions”, while there is no final decision on the revision of the model of access to higher education, which will be communicated “very soon”, he promised. The Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education (MCTES) had already announced that the decision would be communicated this month.
João Costa did not provide details, saying only that some distinction should be maintained between certification of completion of secondary education and access to higher education. In an interview with Expresso , the minister was in favor of maintaining a model similar to the one that has been in force in the last three academic years: as a result of the covid-19 pandemic, secondary education tests are no longer mandatory for the completion of the cycle of studies, being only carried out for specific disciplines by students who intended to enter higher education.
This position does not appear to be shared by MCTES . Last month, the Secretary of State for Higher Education, Pedro Teixeira, defended that the new model for entering higher education will have to find “a balance” between continued work in schools throughout the secondary year and exams as “mechanisms of normalization and comparability”, not contributing to “amplifying social inequalities”.
A recent report by the National Examinations Jury reports that the weight of underprivileged young people among students who take the national secondary examinations dropped by almost half, when these tests began to serve only for access to higher education. “What this reveals are the effects of inequalities in access to higher education – which raises enormous concern”, testified João Costa in response to a question from the PCP.
The Minister of Education confirmed, by the way, that the Plan for the Promotion of School Success, which has mainly targeted the first years of schooling, will in 2023 pay special attention to secondary education as it is “the level at which school failure is higher” – and one of the main “predictors of failure is the socioeconomic conditions of families.
This plan, launched in 2016, will now target “the most vulnerable groups and most heavily impacted by the pandemic, such as gypsy students, and regions where school failure is higher, as is the particular case of the region of Algarve”, he informed.