Fernando Alexandre’s next crisis

These days, the Portuguese public is witnessing a breakdown of trust in the national examination system. With so many areas of the country and the state in crisis, this used ...

These days, the Portuguese public is witnessing a breakdown of trust in the national examination system. With so many areas of the country and the state in crisis, this used to be a non-issue for most Portuguese people. Some debated whether exams should exist at all, others whether they should weigh more heavily, but their administration was dependable.

That is over. For years, the country has been preparing to transition to digital testing, as is already the case with the final exams for the 4th, 6th, and 9th grades. This Minister decided to alter the plan, requiring students to answer on physical sheets that would later be digitized.

In a moment of prudence, he ran a pilot project with the philosophy exam last year. Yet, in what can only be described as irresponsibility, he ignored the vulnerabilities detected in both the digitization and grading platforms. A year later, history repeats itself—not as a tragedy, but as a farce.

It is particularly egregious that we now know that even after these issues came to light, IAVE (the Institute for Educational Evaluation) contracted a new platform that is not yet ready, and the Government chose not to wait for its completion. In truth, it would only solve part of the problem, as it was designed and contracted with the previous digital-testing model in mind. It was a disaster foretold, and Fernando Alexandre chose to forge ahead, disrupting the lives of tens of thousands of teachers and students.

Despite his favorable media coverage, it is difficult not to recall other incidents that paint the picture of a bungling minister—the number of students left without teachers that he ultimately “did not know he didn’t know,” forcing him to retract an alleged 90% reduction in that figure; the delays in housing stipends for displaced teachers; his assertion that higher education was a privilege, leading him to be blocked twice from raising tuition fees; blaming low-income students for the degradation of student residences; or his unacceptable interference in the University of Porto and the University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro, where he was ultimately overruled by the courts.

Just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse, Fernando Alexandre is preparing to treat the country to another display of his irresponsibility and incompetence, this time within higher education financial aid. Currently, 79,000 students rely on grants to afford the costs of accessing and attending higher education. In recent years, a large portion of these grants were automatically renewed—41,000 due to year-over-year transitions, and 5,482 right in the first year of admission.

The security and speed with which these grants were processed gave families the information and confidence needed to make decisions about where to study. Applications were scheduled to open on June 25. This year, they did not.

That very same day, the Government published a decree postponing the process to August 14—a month that usually ends with about half of all applications already submitted. This means that financial aid services, from north to south, will have to assess a significantly higher volume of applications in a much shorter period. That, unfortunately, is not the only issue.

The Government wants to implement a new financial aid model this year, but to this day, those responsible for executing it still do not know what it entails. Basic details remain undefined, such as the actual cost of a room in a university residence, which could be anywhere from €91 to €161. In a strange replay of the national exams saga, a new platform has been announced but is not yet accessible.

All of this could have been avoided. Fernando Alexandre announced the overhaul of the higher education financial aid model on October 25, 2024, citing a “study already underway.” This study, commissioned from Nova SBE, was expected to wrap up by April 30, 2025, so it could take effect in the following academic year.

Instead, it was only presented on September 2, 2025, and the Government waited until December 3 to draw conclusions and establish their intended framework. It then took nearly another six months, until May 21, 2026, for the proposal to be approved by Cabinet. Even so, despite having ample time to develop this reform, financial aid services across the country still lack the complete data required to prepare for its launch.

The information available so far paints a grim picture: according to the rector of the University of Porto, the number of grant recipients will drop by several hundred at that institution alone. Meanwhile, the most vulnerable students could see a reduction in the value of their allocated grants. As for extending housing allowances to middle-class students, that is completely out of the question.

With these national exams, Fernando Alexandre is steering one of the greatest failures in school administration on record. It is a crisis entirely of his own making, one that speaks more to his incompetence than to his ideology. Just around the corner, the Minister is preparing to penalize the very same generation a second time—by rushing and shortchanging financial aid.

Once again, without excuse and without pardon. Miguel Costa Matos/MS The content on the Milénio Stadium website is automatically translated using Google Translate.