University of São Paulo: Full-time school program aims to reduce dropout

In July of this year, Congress approved the law that implements the Escola em Tempo Integral program, sanctioned in the same month by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The program aims to increase full-time vacancies by 1 million for public basic education schools and, by 2026, provides for a total of 3.2 million vacancies. The government investment is approximately R$ 4 billion. Implementation is not mandatory, but schools that adhere to the program will receive funds from the Union.

“There are budget problems, money problems, interest problems. There are families and students who are not interested in spending the whole day at school,” explains Nílson José Machado, professor at the Faculty of Education at USP. According to the 2022 School Census, released in February this year, 50.7% of public schools in Brazil do not have any full-time students and only 6.9% of public schools have between 20% and 50% of their students enrolled in this modality . Goal 6 of the National Education Plan (PNE) aims to offer full-time education to at least 25% of basic education students.

Inviting environment
Staying at school for at least seven hours a day or 35 hours a week, divided into two shifts, will be considered full-time. Ideally, children should be able to fill this time with complementary classes and activities and not “more of the same”, as advocated by Silvia Gasparian Colello, a professor at the Faculty of Education at USP. “I think she [the child] has to spend part time in conventional school and part time with diversified activities, such as arts, sports, music and a moment of individual work where she could do her homework.”

In the text of the Law , there is a forecast of a “curricular reorientation towards integral education”, but without great specifications, even though it is an essential stage of the process. “The great risk of full-time education is that you simply expand quantitatively without a qualitative restructuring of the school”, argues Silvia. Within this restructuring comes the differentiated attention of the teacher, according to Machado: “You can spend ten hours at school clogging up with classes without being heard to speak or you can have fewer classes in schools that cannot give such a great load, receiving the teacher’s general attention.

truancy
One of the justifications presented in the implementation of the program is that a full-time school could reduce school dropouts. “It contributes in two ways: firstly, because they have the greatest pedagogical support, so that child will have support to do their homework, they can have a moment of learning recovery, a greater stimulus from the pedagogical part and, on the one hand, On the other hand, dropout tends to decrease because the child creates a positive bond with the school, he feels welcomed by the school”, points out Silvia.

Another perspective brought by Machado highlights the need to use the available time to encourage students’ interest in different ways. “If you create centers of interest, then it increases permanence at school, activities that students are interested in, and I think that these activities can be perfectly related to subjects, all subjects have things of general interest and interesting things.”

Remodeling the grade so that different student skills are developed also involves establishing a pedagogical objective that contemplates all the changes that the school environment will have to undergo in order to function full-time. “The implementation of a full-time school affects a lot of things, it affects the school’s infrastructure, with a review of space, with a reorganization for food”, points out Silvia.