The Regional Secretary for Culture and Education defended in Horta that education "requires the cooperation of all" and, therefore, he regretted that the opposition "devalues its potential the construction of the future and privileges the reckoning with the past."
 
Avelino Meneses spoke at the Legislative Assembly during the questioning of the Government on education. Bearing in mind the future of the country and the Region, the government official defended the need to protect the education system from "collective ideologies, prejudices and personal bickering and even from political change."
 
"It is important that the structural changes of the education system take place in wider periods, because the teaching time is substantially longer than the political time," said the government official.
 
For the Regional Secretary, students "are the sole priority insofar as they are at the core of the education system and the reason for all the rest." However, he stressed that "the government cannot do everything alone," considering that teachers "are key partners" of the Government, which has also families as its partners; the latter play a "vital role" in the education of children.
 
"If students are at the core of the education system, we must fight with tenacity the obstacles that hinder their progress, namely our main obstacle - school failure." This is important because "tradition conveys the idea that school failure is an indicator of rigour and transparency of the system," said the Regional Government.
 
Avelino Meneses stressed that "there is no place for resignation" in the face of school failure, revealing that the Region has invested in the preparation of an integrated plan to promote educational success, designated as ProSucesso - Azores for Education, which is "the most important challenge for the future of the islands."
 
"The goal of ProSucesso is that all students may be able to achieve academic success. The goal of ProSucesso involves the compliance with the goals of the 2020 Strategy. However, they are still too demanding for the Azores, since they require the reduction of early school dropout, which, in turn, require the containment of school failure," said the Regional Secretary.
 
According to the government official, "more than an intention, ProSucesso is a practice," whose results will yield "over time," but in a "consistent manner." In this regard, he highlighted the focus on the quality of student learning, with the launch of new monitoring projects in teacher training by providing teachers with more resources and better training, as well as with the mobilisation of the education community and social partners.
 
"The success of ProSucesso depends on the availability of resources and have them, starting with more human resources. The school year 2015/2016 will be indelibly marked by the decrease in the number of students by a thousand, consistent with the evolution of demography, but there is an increase in the number of teachers, over 266, to reinforce what is essential: preschool, elementary school, special education and the key subjects disciplines of Portuguese and Math," added the government official.
 
Avelino Meneses stressed that it seems that "everything goes wrong in the world of education," if we believe in the "simple analysis of some indicators and a few national exams, hastily disguised as school rankings."According to him, this is model for the assessment of schools is "incomplete and simplistic."
 
The Regional Secretary for Education and Culture emphasised that the Azores have registered important "progress, noting that early school dropout has fallen from over 60% in 1998 to less than half, about 29%, in 2015. Moreover, he revealed that the school dropout and the respective rate "are null in the elementary and middle school levels and residual in junior high and secondary school levels."
 
The number of students enrolled in vocational training grew from 15% in 1996 to 42% in 2015, "resembling those registered in the rest of developed Europe," the "sharp" drop in student retention rates in all levels of schooling and the investments made in infrastructures throughout the archipelago were other aspects highlighted by Avelino Meneses.
 
In this regard, the Regional Secretary stressed that "only political myopia" prevents the perception of this reality, emphasising the need to turn education "into a clear priority."