Portugal

School starts in Portugal with the age of 6 and is mandatory for 9 years. Noteworthy is the fact that all pupils have the possibility of learning together for the whole compulsory school time. First of all the primary school has to be visited for 4 years, after that there is a 5 year lasting lower secondary school. For the complete compulsory education, every pupil is taught only of one teacher, except some special courses like music or sports.
Afterwards the students are free to visit a upper secondary school to achieve the access to university. There are general and vocational upper secondary schools, technology schools and possibilities of special artistically schools.

[Grafik 4]: The educational system of Portugal

The Ministry of Education is responsible for primary and secondary schools and also for the integration of information- and communication technologies in the national school curriculum. The Ministry for Science and technology is responsible for a wide connectivity of schools to the internet.
Several initiatives like "Internet na Escola" (internet in schools) made it possible to equip all schools with IT hardware and software and also connect the existing PC's with the internet. The mentioned programme was started in 1997 and the catalyst for connecting all primary schools (around 1600) and later also secondary schools and local facilities and libraries with the www.

Since school year 2004 / 2005 ICT should be a separate subject within the curriculum in all schools. This reform is being implemented stepwise and currently it has been carried out for the pupils of 10th classes on general and vocational upper secondary schools. Overall ICT is implemented as separate subject in the curriculum at 24,2% of all schools, which is in comparison to the other European states (average 54,7%) by far the least value.
If there are some informatics courses offered at general schools, they are very specific and practical, at technology schools the contents are based more on theoretical knowledge. Examples of contents of the curriculum are MS Office applications, networks, operating systems, algorithms, internet technologies, programming languages (Visual Basic, C++), CAD, digital systems and computer architectures. [20], [Link19]

Bearing in mind the enormous backwardness in development of the Portuguese educational system, a good progress can be observed within the last 3 decades. But there is still a backlog demand. On average there are only 6,4 Computers per 100 students in Portuguese schools, which means that 16 pupils have to share one computer, 19 one with internet access. Nevertheless the use of computers in classrooms is increasing from 26% of schools using a PC in classrooms to 81% in 2006. Despite the inadequate IT equipment of schools, PCs and the internet were used frequently in classes namely in all subjects. That's also why the curriculum according to ICT is constantly updated and the latest developments are being integrated in the curriculum.
One area where Portugal is still at the end of the list of comparison is the implementation of LANs in schools. Only 14 % of all of them already have a local network installed.

[Tab 3]: Percentage of schools having a LAN

Current debates engaged besides the integration of ICT in the school curriculum with the autonomy of schools. This area also threws up questions about a defined and mendatory integration of ICT and it's implementation at a autonomous school.

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