Portugal 2016

ENQUADRAMENTO SOCIOECONÓMICO EDUCAÇÃO SOCIO-ECONOMIC FRAMEWORK EDUCATION 49 Legislative changes (framework law on education), demographic developments (decline in the youth population), and sectoral policy options (expansion of the public pre-school education network) have influenced developments in the school structure over the past two decades. The number of children enrolled in pre-school increased continuously between 1990/91 and 2010/11. In the following periods the effort devoted to pre-school, notably to consider it universal for children aged 5 and over in 2009, did not translate into a rise in pre-school population. On the contrary, the number of children aged 3-5 enrolled in schools declined at an average rate of -1.2% between 2010/11 and 2015/16, i.e. by almost 6.0% compared to maximum attendance in 2010/11. This may have been due to a long downward trend of the population’s rate of natural increase. In fact, the expansion of the gross pre-school attendance rate was quite significant. In 1990/91 pre-school education encompassed around half of the children aged 3-5, while in 2015/16 it reached little over 91.0% (increasing from the previous year) of this population group.