“Throughout the first school term, now concluded, 13,446 teaching hours were available for contracting at schools,” while in the previous school year there were 9,696, reveals the National Federation of Teachers, which speaks of a “significant increase” of 38.7%.

For Fenprof, these numbers reveal a “deep structural problem,” which worsens “week by week: the chronic shortage of teachers, with the consequent permanent existence of many thousands of students without classes.”

“In several school clusters, the number of vacant teaching hours already exceeds one hundred, while on a regional scale, thousands of vacant hours are registered,” he adds, pointing to Lisbon as the region with the most problems, with 5,285 vacant hours.

Setúbal is the second area in the country with the most teacher shortages, with 1,975 empty teaching hours, according to data from Fenprof, which places Faro in third place (1,444 hours) and Porto in fourth.

“These numbers show that the problem is no longer localized and has taken on a clearly national dimension,” states the largest representative teachers' union.

On Tuesday, the Minister of Education was questioned by journalists about how many students were missing teachers, and admitted that he still cannot give an exact number, just as “no one can”.

The secretariat is setting up an information system that will allow it to answer this question and which, according to Fernando Alexandre, will be a certified, “rigorous and verifiable” system: “It will not be what we have today in the public square, which are people announcing students without classes, which often have no basis in reality.”