The Portuguese educational management agency AGSE has told schools that teachers must submit their class summaries within five days of the end of each month to receive their salaries.
Starting this month, the data will determine teachers' pay and be used to count the number of students without classes.
Rui Cardoso, director of the Viso school grouping in the central city of Viseu, told the Correio da Manha newspaper that the new rules link the financial and pedagogical sides of the profession.
Cardoso said teachers must record the summaries, which are then uploaded to a ministry cloud system to process salaries and immediately calculate overtime.
The requirement would ease administrative work but make teachers responsible for meeting the deadline of five days, Cardoso said, adding that he expected initial confusion and problems to solve.
School management updates
AGSE told schools that management applications would be updated in the coming days for the 2026 to 2027 academic year, to ensure a more rigorous record of teaching activity.
The updates will introduce a national class status, identifying whether a lesson was taught by a permanent or substitute teacher, and whether it was replaced, pending, inconsistent or not given.
José Feliciano Costa, from the Fenprof teachers union, said the measure created more bureaucracy and control to feed the school management platforms market.
Costa said schools were being turned into data providers, and that a teacher's central role was shifting from teaching to registering, validating and synchronising data.
Training sessions begin
Training sessions for the changes began in schools on Wednesday.
AGSE said it was working with software providers to simplify data synchronisation between school applications and central platforms, aiming to reduce the need for schools to intervene.
For now, the agency said, schools are responsible for ensuring all exports are executed correctly and sent to the central systems.
The Correio da Manha reported in January that the education ministry intended to make salary payments dependent on the class summaries.
