In October 2021, the Government of the Azores announced that it intended to implement a “Strategy for the Decade” in Education, even calling for it to be the subject of a Regime Pact.
Three years after this announcement, the government presented a document it called the “Azores Education Strategy 2030”, 121 pages long, containing a chapter entitled “Analysis of Results,” 3 pages of “Targets and Indicators,” and 3 pages of “Actions.”
In my opinion, there are four problems with this document.
First, this document does not include any “solutions” that aim to respond to two critical dimensions of the Azorean issue, which strongly involve education and concern us: the fight against poverty and the employability of the Azoreans. I know that the government claims that this “strategy” would be “articulated” with the work of other departments. However, it is precisely the structuring of public policies involving education that must be contained in a single guiding document that sets out the objectives and all the problems to which we want education to respond. And there is not even an outline of this articulation. This had to be “the” “articulating” document, and this absence mortally wounds what I consider to be the basis of an education intervention philosophy that includes combating poverty and preparing for employment. An Education Plan, given its nature and the demands of its operationalization, has to be a document that cuts across the government’s public policies, not those of one of its departments.
The second problem has to do with the fact that this document is not consistent. It states that “The discrepancy between the skills that young people have and the skills that are being demanded of them must be greatly reduced”, but the document contains no measures to combat this discrepancy. It also mentions what the UN recommends, namely to “substantially increase the number of young people and adults with relevant qualifications, including technical and professional skills, for employment and decent work” or what the European Education Strategy recommends, namely to take action including “education, training and learning in all contexts and at all levels, from early childhood education and care to adult learning”, but all this has no consequences in terms of action. There is no “action” in this direction. Referring to all those good objectives, pretending that the document presented was based on them without drawing any consequences in terms of action, is an exercise in lamentable hypocrisy.
The third problem has to do with the enormous fragility of the intentions announced in a chapter entitled… “analysis of results” (sic)
Starting with the “Goals and Indicators”: Aiming for 15% of early school leavers by 2030 when, if we maintain the downward trend of the last decade, we would naturally reach 8.7% is incomprehensible (the rate of decrease has been 1.8 percentage points per year since 2011); it is also illogical to intend to reach 82,400 Azoreans with secondary or higher education, which represents a growth rate of 11% when the growth of this group of Azoreans has been 57%. What’s even more incomprehensible is that the government calls this “ambition (!) and “acceleration to make up for lost time”.
As for PISA, the target indicated for the gap between the values in the Azores is double the average gap between 2000 and 2018 (removing the catastrophic 2022 value).
In the “actions” – a list of completely disjointed “actions”, with no guiding line – there is not a Plan to combat early school leaving, but the announcement of “drawing up a Plan”. Incredible.
And there’s nothing about accompanying young people in designing their life projects, particularly on the path to their profession. There’s nothing about the more than 6,000 young people who neither work nor study. And look at the scale of the issue: there are more young people in this situation than secondary school pupils. It is unacceptable that there is no plan for them.
It is promised to monitor what has been announced annually when there are no annual reference values. What will the yearly figures be compared to? Will there be deviations to rectify and improvements to encourage progress? We won’t know.
A fourth problem is the conceptual and structural weakness of this document.
What we would have liked is for it to set out a broad, complete, and daring range of objectives, based, of course, on our reality, with their respective indicators, guiding a path to achieve them, outlining the mandatory crossing points to get there, scheduling everything, outlining its financing and organizing the coordination of the different players, with a monitoring and steering system for all of this. We should have included a relevant element of our reality: we have two significant advantages in dealing with our weaknesses. There are only a few of us (240,000), so we can imagine accompanying every Azorean on their educational journey, and we have the skills to devise our own responses.
It should have been a document to change and seize the moment. It wasn’t.
It was a Strategy. On the cover, the “goals,” “indicators,” and “actions” are presented in a chapter called “Analysis of Results,” and in the Conclusions, it is stated that it is a “plan.” A goal is not an objective, a plan is not a strategy, and a Strategy isn’t any of that. What was a Strategy for the decade has become a partial alignment of intentions for half a decade, which I hope the representatives of the Azorean people in the regional assembly will not let pass.
One last word on the sidelines of this “contribution” of mine: those who have become accustomed to seeing me with restraint will excuse my vehemence. But the issue is too important, and the problem is too severe.


Rui Bettencourt, who served in various governments in the Azores for nearly 20 years, is a specialist in Professional Development.

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department (MCLL) as part of Bruma Publication and ADMA (Azores-Diaspora Media Alliance) at California State University, Fresno, PBBI thanks FLAD for sponsoring all of our PBBI projects.