Our school is located in the central part of Portugal, more or less 100 km away from big cities like Oporto and Coimbra.
It is a public school in a rural area which means that most students' families live from agriculture. Others work abroad mainly in Switzerland. That’s why a significant percentage of our students live with a relative. The population of our school mainly comes from the town and the surrounding villages. Currently 206 teachers teach at Agrupamento de Escolas de Castro Daire and 1588 pupils attend it from Kindergarden up to secondary education, thus our students ages vary from 3 to 19. In terms of vocational courses, the offers kind of change every year according to the needs of the work market. Since Portugal receives a lot of tourists from abroad and requires skilled workers in that area , our school tends to adapt to that and almost every new school year the pupils who just want to complete compulsory education can choose professional courses related to tourism, catering, massage or ICT. Although the school management would like to develop other training programmes and courses to teach the pupils job skills to prepare them so that one day they could work as electricians or mechanics and tries to buy specific equipment for the professional courses, the tight budgets hinder. As a result, pupils can choose only from a very limited variety of professional courses and have to leave their hometown very young if they want to follow another path. As far as regular education is concerned, at the beginning of the 10th form pupils are required to choose what they would like to study during secondary education which lasts three years. The most chosen courses at that level have to do with science and technology. Few pupils grab the opportunity to study humanities, languages, literature and economics though they show more competence in those areas. Our school has already taken part in former Comenius projects, because we recognize the importance of such projects for both teachers and students. Moreover, in order to live in a United world it’s vital to foster entrepreneurship, enhance language skills, train and develop ICT skills so as to face the new challenges of the 21st century. The people responsible for the project at our school have already participated in national and international projects. They teach mainly English and ICT.
Currently our school is participating in two e-Twinning projects and in the past it has taken part in two Comenius partnerships. What is more, with the aim to encourage the spirit of entrepreneurship among young people, it began its participation in different regional entrepreneurship projects in 2011/2012 and was awarded with prominent prizes for the business ideas presented during the following years.