“Nobody is on vacation”, warns Minister of Education | Coronavirus

The Minister of Education announced on Friday that teachers and non-teaching staff will have to continue to perform in schools as long as the suspension of all classroom teaching and non-teaching activities that the Government decreed from next Monday until the beginning of the Easter holidays. “Nobody is on vacation”, stressed Tiago Brandão Rodrigues at the press conference of the Council of Ministers, which he approved today a package of measures in several areas to address the current pandemic of the new coronavirus in Portugal.

From Monday, face-to-face classes will be suspended at all levels of education, from the first cycle of basic education to university education, a measure that covers almost two million students across the country. Nurseries and ATL are also covered by the restrictions currently imposed by the Government, which have a duration of two weeks but which in practice will be four, since they “stick” with the Easter holidays scheduled for the period between March 30 and April 13 2020.

Although classes are suspended, Brandão Rodrigues insisted, “employees and teachers are not on vacation” and so they should go to work. An idea reinforced by the Minister of State, Economy and Digital Transition, Pedro Siza Vieira, one of the five ministers who was responsible for presenting the batch of measures approved by the Government to try to stop the spread of the new virus in the country.

“We are all going to have to work. The country will all have to work. But we can work in a different way, reducing the interaction. There are good practices so that people can continue in their jobs ”, said Siza Vieira, insisting that the measures do not represent an anticipation of vacation but an attempt to reduce the risks of contagion of the virus.

Tiago Brandão Rodrigues suggested that some of the meetings in schools start to take place on the basis of teleworking or videoconferencing, but he argued that the absence of students from the school space will already allow employees and teachers a greater social distance.