As the new academic year begins, the Azores Teachers’ Union says nearly empty candidate lists, hundreds of unfilled teaching schedules, shortages of support staff, difficulties in inclusive education, delayed digital textbooks and deteriorating school buildings are exposing a deeper challenge: how can an island education system attract and retain the people it needs?
A school year normally begins with familiar rituals: doors reopening after summer, names being called for the first time, books and computers appearing on desks, teachers meeting new classes and children discovering that another year of their lives has begun. Yet behind that apparent normality, the Azores Teachers’ Union (SPRA) says the 2026–27 academic year is beginning under growing pressure. Its warning reaches well beyond the absence of individual teachers. The union describes a system in which shortages of teaching and non-teaching staff, difficulties in inclusive education, problems accessing digital textbooks and deteriorating infrastructure are converging inside the same schools.
The most immediate concern is the availability of teachers. According to figures presented by SPRA, candidate lists are “practically empty,” while schools have placed 234 teaching schedules through school-level recruitment offers, representing almost 5,000 classroom hours every week. The union warns that some may remain unfilled because there simply are not enough applicants. SPRA attributes the shortage partly to a profession that it believes has become insufficiently attractive, but also to housing costs and inadequate incentives for teachers asked to establish themselves on islands or in schools where recruitment is particularly difficult. It argues that existing regional measures—including an accommodation allowance increased from €300 to €500 and recruitment priorities intended to encourage placement—have not produced the results promised.
Behind today’s vacancies lies an even more troubling arithmetic about tomorrow. SPRA says 92 teachers retired between September 2025 and September 2026, while only 27 prospective teachers entered initial teacher training at the University of the Azores. Those figures do not by themselves provide a complete forecast of future staffing, since teachers can enter the system through other routes and circumstances vary by subject, but the imbalance illustrates the union’s concern about generational renewal. It also points to dozens of teachers with appropriate academic qualifications and at least five years of service who, according to SPRA, remain without access to professional certification. The union therefore calls for a broader strategy combining recruitment and retention with professional recognition, initial training and in-service professionalization.
The shortage, SPRA argues, does not stop at the classroom door. Operational assistants are essential to the daily functioning and safety of schools, and the union maintains that announced recruitment will not even compensate fully for retirements in that workforce. Inclusive education presents an even more demanding picture. SPRA reports shortages of specialized teachers, psychologists, operational assistants and other professionals, together with inadequate pedagogical materials and physical spaces. It also accuses the education authorities of refusing some additional schedules and classes requested by schools. For children requiring individualized support, these shortages are not administrative abstractions: inclusion ultimately depends upon having enough trained people present when and where a student needs them.
Technology has added another layer of difficulty. SPRA says hundreds of teachers and students began the year without access to digital textbooks because licenses had not yet been made available, while warning that school wireless networks may face additional pressure as usage increases. The union does not reject digital resources, but argues that they should complement rather than replace printed textbooks. Its position enters a wider Azorean debate already underway over the pedagogical consequences of digital learning, particularly now that an independent evaluation of the Region’s digital textbook program has been completed and is awaiting public presentation.
Then there are the buildings themselves. SPRA describes school infrastructure requiring maintenance, rehabilitation and substantial upgrading and criticizes what it considers the absence of sufficient preventive maintenance. A leaking roof, deteriorating classroom or repeatedly postponed repair may appear separate from teacher recruitment or educational inclusion, but together they shape the environment in which learning is expected to occur. Schools ask children to believe in the future; the condition of the places in which they study inevitably says something about how seriously adults take that promise.
The union’s assessment is, of course, one institutional perspective in a broader political and educational debate. Regional education authorities have emphasized increased investment, recruitment efforts and improving student outcomes. SPRA’s argument is different: acknowledging shortages is no longer sufficient unless recognition is followed by structural measures capable of making teaching attractive, renewing the profession and providing schools with the human and physical resources they require.
Education is often discussed through budgets, examination averages, recruitment lists and international assessments. But eventually all those numbers arrive in one very small place: a classroom.
There, the essential equation remains remarkably old-fashioned. There must be a student ready to learn, a school capable of supporting that student—and someone qualified, valued and willing to stand at the front of the room and teach.
Based on a story in Diário dos Açores, Paulo Viveiros, director. The photo os also from DA.