Parents frustrated as 1 in 4 Portuguese inclusive classes breach education law

The latest survey by the country’s biggest teachers’ federation lands like a cold splash: more than a quarter of all Portuguese classes that include pupils with disabilities or learning difficulties are now breaking the law designed to protect them. That headline figure has crept upward for the third year running, and behind it lies a tangle of overcrowded rooms, missing specialists and exhausted teachers who say they can no longer deliver the personalised attention Parliament promised seven years ago.

Why it matters to families in Portugal

Parents who believed the much-lauded Decreto-Lei 54/2018 would guarantee smaller classes and individual support are discovering the opposite. According to data collected in late 2025 by the National Federation of Teachers, 27.1 % of mixed-ability classes exceed at least one legal limit, whether in maximum headcount or in the number of pupils requiring specialised help. In practical terms that means some classrooms hold 23 children where the cap is 20, while others squeeze in three or four pupils with complex needs even though the rule allows no more than two. If both thresholds are crossed simultaneously, the class is definitively illegal — something that now happens in roughly 1 in 15 rooms.

A law with teeth, but no bite marks

Portugal’s inclusive-education statute was hailed in Brussels as one of Europe’s most advanced when it came into force. It obliges schools to tailor teaching to every learner and to review compliance every five years. Yet the Ministry of Education has never commissioned the mandatory evaluation, leaving civil-society groups to fill the vacuum. The latest union questionnaire reached more than two-thirds of school clusters and confirmed a chronic mismatch between legislative ambition and everyday reality. Nearly 75 % of headteachers say they have too few special-education teachers; about the same share could not fill a single vacancy during the last hiring round; and 77 % admit they lack enough classroom assistants to guarantee basic safety, let alone pedagogical adaptation.

Inside the overcrowded classroom

One director in Setúbal describes a first-year primary room where a single teacher coordinates 24 children, six with official diagnoses ranging from autism to motor impairments. The weekly timetable promises intensive pull-out sessions, but the special-needs teacher assigned to the cluster covers five schools and spends fewer than 30 minutes per child. In Porto, a secondary school has converted its library into a makeshift therapy corner because every other space is already teaching overflow. Educators report mounting discipline problems, slower academic progress for all pupils and growing parental frustration. Risk of burnout is also rising: surveys show nearly 40 % of teachers contemplating early retirement cite inclusive-education overload as a deciding factor.

Comparing notes with Europe

Legally, Portugal sits in the same progressive column as Italy, Sweden, Germany and England, all signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Implementation, however, tells a different story. Italy operates with a dedicated sostegno teacher for nearly every child requiring individual education plans and registers a 99.6 % mainstreaming rate without systematic overcrowding. Sweden caps class size far lower than the Portuguese standard and finances extra adults through municipal budgets. Analysts at the European Agency for Special Needs Education estimate that Portugal spends €1,900 less per pupil with disabilities than the Italian average, a gap that directly translates into fewer professionals on the ground.

What could shift the dial in 2026

With the general budget under discussion, education unions are urging the Assembly to earmark funds for 1,500 additional special-education teachers, a recruitment drive for therapists, and a renovation programme to create physically accessible rooms. Lawmakers from across the aisle admit privately that enforcement has failed, but they differ on remedies: some propose penalties for overcrowded schools, others argue that only clear funding streams will make the decree more than parchment. Meanwhile, families wait. As one mother from Évora put it after yet another meeting about her son’s truncated support sessions, “Inclusion is a beautiful word. I am still waiting to see it in action.”