THE PORTUGUESE SCHOOL

Our school is located in the northern part of Madeira Island. Santana, the village is very known because its typical houses with a triangle shape and with culm roof.
The surrounding area, belongs to a byosfere reserve and it has one of the biggest forest patches of “Laurissilva”.
The school has already welcomed around a thousand students annually, but currently we have less than 400 pupils from 11 to 18 years of age and 82 teachers.
As a public institution of education, our school has a fundamental role in the fight against illiteracy and the reduction of school failure and abandonment. Therefore, we are becoming more and more proactive, striving to boost our pupils' motivation and key literacies. Some examples are our commitment to the creation and implementation of Alternative Curricular Pathways (VET), Professional Courses (CP) and Lifelong Learning Courses, to enable inclusion and combat social exclusion.
Simultaneously, protocols have been established with public and private institutions to further expand the training offer. This is one of the reasons why we have a so big number of teachers. Some of them, being teachers from the school are working in different institutions sportive, cultural, e.g., with which we have protocols.
It should be noted that it is in a suburban area in an ultra-peripheral region. Due to economic dependence on services and essentially subsistence agriculture, there is a great tendency towards emigration among the younger population of our small island to Great Britain, Switzerland, let alone South Africa. For this reason, we are keen on sustaining our language and culture, which is rich in customs and the cornerstone to our tourism.