From the Classroom Up: Azores Open the School Year with New Approaches to Learning

Regional Education Secretary Sofia Ribeiro says bilingual education, arts instruction and computational thinking reflect an effort to give schools greater room to develop projects from within their own communities rather than imposing uniform solutions from above.

The beginning of a school year is usually measured in returning students, new teachers and classrooms reopening after summer. In the Azores, however, the start of 2026–2027 is also being presented as an opportunity to rethink how learning itself is organized. Speaking at the opening ceremony for the academic year at the Velas Elementary and Secondary School on São Jorge, Regional Secretary for Education, Culture and Sport Sofia Ribeiro highlighted a growing diversity of educational projects, including bilingual instruction in English, arts education in the first years of schooling and the expansion of computational thinking.

At the center of Ribeiro’s message was the principle that innovation should not always travel from government offices toward schools. Educational communities, she argued, should participate “dynamically” in constructing differentiated responses suited to their students. “Instead of having policies from the top down, we create the conditions for these projects to begin at the base,” she said. “That is the key to success.” In an archipelago of nine islands, where schools operate within communities of very different sizes and circumstances, such an approach also recognizes that educational needs are not necessarily identical everywhere.

Velas was presented as an example of that philosophy. The school embraced opportunities involving arts education in the first cycle and bilingual English instruction, becoming, according to Ribeiro, a regional reference whose practices deserve to be recognized and shared. The significance is not merely the addition of new subjects. It is the possibility of broadening what children encounter during their formative years—language, creativity and artistic expression alongside the traditional foundations of literacy, mathematics and science.

Computational thinking represents another part of that transformation. Initially introduced as a pioneering and voluntary project, it has been taken up across Azorean schools and, for the first time this year, reaches the fifth grade. Ribeiro emphasized the growing importance of this field, noting that related competencies have entered the international educational conversation through PISA assessments. The larger educational challenge is not simply teaching children to use technology, but helping them develop the habits of reasoning behind it: breaking complex problems into parts, recognizing patterns, constructing logical sequences and imagining different paths toward a solution.

The Secretary also pointed to recent PISA results, emphasizing that Azorean students improved in Reading, Mathematics and Science while national and OECD averages showed downward movement. The improvement offers encouragement, although it does not eliminate the broader challenges facing Azorean education or the continuing need to close performance gaps. The value of the results may therefore lie less in declaring victory than in asking which practices are working and how they can be strengthened.

That connection between technology and learning was made tangible during the ceremony with the inauguration of a new room equipped for computing and robotics, created through a winning proposal in the Azores Participatory Budget. It is a small but symbolic example of an educational system attempting to connect public participation, school initiative and new forms of knowledge.

For islands, education has always carried a particular responsibility. Geography can create distance, but a school can prevent distance from becoming limitation. English can open another linguistic horizon; the arts can teach children to imagine and interpret; computational thinking can prepare them for a technological world whose professions are still being invented.

The most promising idea in the opening of this Azorean school year may therefore be a relatively simple one: not every educational innovation needs to descend from the top. Sometimes the future of a school begins inside the school itself—with teachers and communities given the freedom to ask what their children need, and the opportunity to build an answer.

Based on a story in Diário dos Açores, Paulo Viveiros-director. The photos are from Governo dos Açores.