A decree was published on 5 August in Diário da República regulating the creation and operation of new courses, for which funding notices will be launched later this year, the Secretary of State for Integration and Migration, Cláudia Pereira, said to Lusa. She added that it is also a priority of her office to reinforce the financing of these training courses in Portuguese for foreigners through the next community framework, still under evaluation, but through which they intend to dedicate a larger amount to PLA courses.

The Government's measure comes to review the Portuguese for All programme, inserted in the National Plan for Implementation of the Global Pact on Migration, which aims to strengthen social cohesion, promoting greater social and labour integration of migrants through the mastery and fluency of the Portuguese language and its novelty is the teaching of PLA in Qualifica centres, professional training and recognition and validation of competences.

“We were looking at how we could make these Portuguese language courses for foreigners more effective, that is, that almost 100 percent of students could pass this course and be able to speak Portuguese. In this sense, it was also decided to open to Qualifica centres and the objective is that when immigrants have courses at Qualifica centres they can learn Portuguese, but they can also have access to other courses taught there to better suit the job market”, explained the secretary of State.

One of the advantages of these centres, said the minister, is the flexibility of schedules, allowing, for example, those who work in the cleaning sector to attend classes in the afternoon and those who work in agriculture to do so at the end of the workday.

Schedules and the difficulty of reconciling professional life are two reasons for the failure rate of 40 percent in current courses.

The other, said the Secretary of State, is bureaucratic and is eliminated in the ordinance published on 5 August, with the minimum number of students for the constitution of a class being reduced to 15, allowing the opening of training courses in less populated areas of the country where it was not possible to reach numbers that allow opening classes.

The maximum number of students per class is now 20, but the maximum and minimum numbers for opening classes can be relaxed, with exceptional authorisations.

PLA also has a new curricular unit, which introduces a learning module for speakers of languages ??who do not use the Latin alphabet or use different writing systems, designed to respond mainly to the growing weight of Nepalese and Indian migrants in Portugal.

The objective is to have the new courses dispersed throughout the national territory, reaching the largest number of migrants possible, so that through language, greater integration and better communication with the Portuguese can be achieved, contributing to “greater social peace”, said Cláudia Pereira.

Currently, the chances of training in Portuguese for foreigners pass through the courses of the Portuguese for All programme, which have existed since 2008 and have already trained approximately 92 thousand people, the Portuguese online platform, available through the official website of the High Commissioner for Migrations (ACM) and which has around 24 thousand users, and the 'Speak' programme, in partnership with ACM, and which has been widely used by refugees in the last two years, according to Cláudia Pereira.

PLA will be able to be taught in public schools, in the Employment and Vocational Training Centres and in Qualifica Centres, or other spaces of other entities with which protocols are established.

"The development of PLA courses is ensured by professional teachers in the field of Portuguese teaching, preferably with specific training in teaching Portuguese as a foreign or second language, or by trainers with specific training in the same area", determines the ordinance.