Teachers at Portuguese schools in Timor-Leste, Mozambique, Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe end a two-day strike this Friday for "equitable working conditions among teachers".
"I can honestly say that we are completely determined to resolve the problems, so we are going to work towards that," said the head of Portuguese diplomacy, after visiting the Portuguese School of Macau.
However, Rangel admitted that the Portuguese Government is limited by having only management powers, given the dissolution of the Portuguese National Assembly on March 20: "This is obviously also a constraint that we have at this stage".
The minister confirmed that "there are indeed issues to be resolved" in Portuguese schools abroad, but highlighted that some of the problems "are structural and go back a long way".
Rangel argued that the government managed to "anticipate (...) the resolution of some problems in several schools", but added that "you can't resolve everything at once".
On the other hand, on the sidelines of a reception for the Portuguese community in Macau, the diplomat highlighted that "the problems faced by Portuguese schools abroad are not all the same".
"Each school has a different context, this also has to do with the fact that they are in countries with very different regimes [and] the agreements to found them are different," he added.
The strike in Portuguese Schools in Timor-Leste, Mozambique, Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe was called by the Union of All Education Professionals (S.TO.P).
The director of the Portuguese School of Mozambique, Luísa Antunes, admitted to Lusa that the establishment in Maputo did not operate normally on Thursday due to the strike and acknowledged difficulties and losses for the students.
On the same day, teachers from the Portuguese School of Luanda (EPL), in Angola, told Lusa that they were upset by the "silence" of the Portuguese Government.
In the capital of East Timor, teachers, both contracted and temporarily mobile, gathered at the entrance to the Portuguese School of Dili, in protest for "equity for all".
According to S.TO.P, after EPL teachers "carried out a five-day strike with high participation in the last week of February, the struggle is now expanding to more schools jointly, revealing that the problems are widespread in them."
The issue at hand is the fact that contracted teachers and those working at Portuguese schools abroad face "worse working conditions than their colleagues in Portugal and their school colleagues who are on statutory mobility", the union pointed out.
