Over the past ten years, the number of students with foreign citizenship enrolled in Portugal’s public schools has risen by 283%. Today, one in seven schoolchildren in the country is a foreign national, and the education system is increasingly facing challenges related to the integration of new arrivals.

According to a study by the EDULOG project of the Belmiro de Azevedo Foundation, foreign students accounted for 14.3% of all pupils in public schools during the 2023/24 academic year. Nearly half came from Brazil, while the remainder were primarily from Portuguese-speaking African countries and various Asian nations.

Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show that Portugal is not among the European countries with the highest share of children from immigrant families. However, it recorded the fastest growth in this indicator among countries participating in the PISA study.

Around 22,000 children arriving from abroad enter primary education each year. Researchers estimate that Portuguese schools will continue to receive between 14,000 and 22,000 new foreign students annually through 2031.

Language remains the main challenge. Only a small proportion of students attend Portuguese-as-a-second-language classes: 19% in lower secondary education and 14% in upper secondary education. As a result, academic performance differs significantly from the national average. Foreign students are held back a grade three to five times more often than their Portuguese peers. In upper secondary education, the retention rate reaches 29%, compared with 8.3% among local students.

Another concerning figure is that more than 80% of foreign students did not sit the ninth-grade national exams in Portuguese and mathematics. Without these exams, access to further education becomes considerably more difficult.

The study suggests that the number of foreign students will continue to grow. For schools, the key challenge is therefore no longer how to accommodate new arrivals, but how to ensure they can succeed academically on equal terms with their classmates.