Teachers point out challenges of full-time school

Forest of São João (BA) – Last Thursday (3), the municipality of Mata de São João (BA) achieved the goal of enrolling all municipal schools full-time. The milestone was reached with the inauguration of the Municipal School Professora Angelina Rodrigues do Nascimento, in Praia do Forte. In the city, located in the metropolitan region of Salvador, kindergarten and elementary school students spend at least seven hours a day at school and participate in sports, culture and sustainability activities.

The modality became a national public policy this week with the enactment of Law 14,640/2023, which establishes the Escola em Tempo Integral Program. The federal government will invest BRL 4 billion to increase the number of full-time enrollments in basic education schools by 1 million in 2023. The goal is to reach, by 2026, around 3.2 million enrollments.

Mata de São João, according to the municipality’s Secretary of Education, Alex Carvalho, should join the federal program to qualify the provision of full-time education. Now, after the sanction of the law, the details of the program will be defined after a cycle of seminars in the five regions. The debates also started this week, in Cuiabá, on Thursday and Friday (4) and are broadcast on YouTube.

In Mata de São João, since 2010 the local government has invested in full-time education. “This decision is based on studies and research that were carried out by the municipality that pointed to comprehensive education as a possibility to improve the quality of student learning”, says the Secretary of Education. Carvalho attributes to the modality the improvement in performance in the Basic Education Development Index (Ideb), which measures the quality of teaching. The city had the best performance in the early years of elementary school, from 5th to 9th grade in the metropolitan region, in 2021.

In addition to the structures of the schools themselves, students rely on city equipment for teaching and learning.

“We use the beach, the countryside, the town square. Our idea was to transform Mata de São João into an educational territory. We do trails with the students, we show nature, we show the projects there are in the city, such as the Tamar project and the Baleia Jubarte project. We present the history of our city, its relevance to our country and our state. There is this work where students take advantage of all possible learning environments”

says the secretary.

full-time reference

For the Ministry of Education (MEC), full-time education is the extension of the time spent in schools for a period equal to or greater than seven hours a day or 35 hours a week. The modality aims at the perspective of the development and integral formation of babies, children and adolescents from an intentional and integrated curriculum, which expands and articulates different educational, social, cultural and sports experiences in spaces inside and outside the school with the participation of the school community.

Full-time education has been a reality at the Escola de Referência em Ensino Médio Ginásio Pernambucano since 2004. The school, which is located in Recife, operates in the oldest school in the country, founded in 1825. The 692 students, all in high school, have nine classes a day, from 7:30 am to 5:00 pm. They have three meals a day and the activities are either led by the teachers or developed by the students themselves at times, to encourage the teenagers to play a leading role.

“We perceive integral education, and we usually talk to students, as something that has nothing to do with the time spent in school, but with the integrality of the formation, the integrality while forming social subjects”, says the manager of the school, Oscar Neto. “She develops autonomy, resilience, proactivity, taking the initiative. Young people are more creative, more inventive, argue, participate, reflect critically. They begin to build a necessary framework for the world and not only for the world of work, but for other spheres of life”

complements.

Neto explains that one of the activities is created by the young people themselves, the so-called protagonism club. These are clubs that run between classes, where students develop activities such as theater, dance, chess, board games. “They take advantage of this moment to interact, to base their learning”, he explains.

for students

The president of the Brazilian Union of Secondary Students (Ubes), Jade Beatriz, is one of the students who attended full-time high school at the State School of Professional Education Dona Creusa do Carmo Rocha, in Fortaleza. “The experience I had was positive. I took a technical course and, after school, I had a theater workshop, a dance workshop, a singing workshop and even tutoring classes with teachers.”

She points out, however, that, for it to work, full-time education needs a minimum structure and also scholarships to help students who will stay longer at school. Ubes points out some challenges for school implementation, among them is the fact that in order to implement full-time education, schools end up closing mainly night teaching. This causes students who need to work to end up dropping out of school.

So that this does not happen, the student says that assistance is needed so that these students can be able to attend full-time education. In addition, he emphasizes, it is necessary to improve meals so that students have access to three meals that are nutritious, in addition to improving the infrastructure of schools, which are often scrapped.

“Many young people are underemployed, as delivery men, at signs selling sweets. To combat this and also child labor, we understand that it is important to have a permanence scholarship for full-time schools. That this be done in a qualitative way, understanding that the schools that will join need to undergo restructuring both in the pedagogical part and in the infrastructure”

says Beatrice.

comprehensive education

The Law of Guidelines and Bases (LDB), Law 9.394/1996, provides that schools have a minimum annual workload of 800 hours, distributed over at least 200 days of effective school work, which is equivalent to four hours a day.

Extending the school day is a goal set out in the National Education Plan (PNE), Law 13,005/2014. The PNE establishes the supply of “full-time education in at least 50% of public schools, in order to serve at least 25% of basic education students”. The Report of the 4th Monitoring Cycle of the PNE 2022 Goals shows that the percentage of full-time enrollments in the Brazilian public network dropped from 17.6% in 2014 to 15.1% in 2021.

“When you talk about full-time school outside Brazil, it doesn’t even make sense if it’s just school, because the school already has a workload of seven hours. We are talking about a rearrangement of the educational system to be in line with what is seen internationally. We expect similar results in Pisa [Programa Internacional de Avaliação de Alunos] and in PIRLS [Estudo Internacional de Progresso em Leitura]but with an offer of education in less time”

says the director of Projects at the Lemann Foundation, Lucas Rocha.

The manager of Educational Policies at Todos pela Educação, Ivan Gontijo, complements: “I think the federal government is right to launch a program to induce full-time enrollment so that students spend more time in school, but the big challenge is that these schools that are going to be transformed from part-time to full-time are schools that have a differentiated pedagogical proposal. Because just increasing the workload to be more of the same doesn’t make much sense. So, I think this is the big challenge for the implementation of this policy. How to ensure that this full-time school is truly integral”it says.

Gontijo points out that full-time school cannot be a “in which students, instead of spending four hours sitting in a row, spend seven hours. This is not the proposal. It is a proposal in which students are placed at the center of the teaching and learning process, have their youth protagonism process developed, have another relationship with the school space, this is something that we need to think about”.

Challenges

According to the general coordinator of the National Campaign for the Right to Education, Andressa Pellanda, one of the achievements of the new program is the prioritization of schools that serve students in situations of greater socioeconomic vulnerability.

“One of the concerns we always have is that full-time education had usually been, in history, very dedicated to urban schools, in places with a richer, whiter population and did not reach a population that not only needs but has the right to to a comprehensive education”

it says.

The implementation of full-time teaching brings, according to the general coordinator, some challenges such as improving the infrastructure of schools, defining a career plan for teachers, who will start to work more hours a day in the same school, and student retention policies.

As pointed out by Jade Beatriz, Andressa Pellanda also defends the need for scholarships for students.

“I think one of the main issues is permanence. We know that several students do not stay, they leave school part-time because they cannot afford to stay in school. And, for full-time even more, the study that was done now is that there needed to be an incentive for these populations that are in a situation of vulnerability. We need a permanence policy. Integral education without permanence either does not exist or exists in an exclusive manner”

he declared.

According to the general coordinator, this program is a step forward, but progress is still needed, both in the PNE law and in financing, in the National Education System, “for more and more Brazilian education to stop talking about full-time education and talk about integral education, which is the model of law that we defend”.

*With information from Agência Brasil

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