The Regional Secretary for Education and Culture announced today the creation of the Fénix-Açores programme, which is line with the experience gained with the implementation of the Fénix project in various regional school establishments since the school year 2012/2013.

Avelino Meneses stressed that the creation of a specific programme, which will cover more than forty projects in the next school year, involving 3,900 students, is necessary for being "a powerful tool in learning recovery."

"In coming years, the Fénix project will provide a new opportunity to all those who have learning difficulties so that they may able to resume the path of relative homogeneity within our classes," said the government official.

Speaking to journalists, the Regional Secretary conveyed his hope that, "once the battle of success is won and this battle will be won one day," the Fénix project will also stimulate the learning of students with higher levels of proficiency" since "the ultimate goal of education is to achieve excellence."

Targeted at basic education students, the Fénix programme has been "showing its success," Avelino Meneses said, pointing out that it "detects learning difficulties at an earlier stage, which can be easily eradicated at the beginning rather than after years and years of getting worse.

In this context, the government official considered that this is "a useful tool to combat school failure, which raises the lack of interest and early drop-out."

The initiative is line with the current school environment. In fact, it is "a programme that responds to the specific needs of each student, respecting the diversity of our target audience without attempting to reduce them to the homogeneity of the time of Napoleon, which is not feasible in today’s model of compulsory education," said Avelino Meneses.

The Regional Secretary stressed that this regional programme follows the purposes of the national Fénix programme, since it "fight against school failure and early drop-out," particularly with regard to the core subjects, Portuguese and Math.

The regional programme provides the reorganisation of classes in a given school year with the aim of promoting "a more flexible organisation" that will be line with the specific needs of the students involved. Moreover, it proposes new forms of intervention.

Hence, the "nest" support will remain for students from elementary school to junior high school. In this case, students with major difficulties are included into smaller groups in order to promote a better and faster acquisition of knowledge. In addition, two new types of support will be created for middle school and junior high school students to increase of the effectiveness of the programme: "Fénix A,B,C" and "Fénix Turnos."

The new support measures are intended to promote the possibility of a "differentiated and more individualised work" in a process that can be carried out throughout the school year or be adjusted in accordance with the results of the assessment that will be eventually made.