Excessive bureaucracy in schools is the order of the day, both in conversations between teachers and on social networks and traditional media. Some studies confirm that this is one of the main constraints highlighted by Portuguese teachers as inhibiting better quality teaching and that it is even affecting their health, making it urgent to intervene in this field.

The widespread implementation, in the current academic year in all schools, of Decrees-Law 54/2018 and 55/2018, both of July 6, which establish, respectively, the “Legal Regime for Inclusive Education” and the “Teaching Curriculum basic and secondary” with the guiding principles of the assessment of learning within the scope of curricular flexibility introduced a new dynamic, eventually leading to an increase in bureaucracy in schools.

The implementation of the two decrees-laws, already quite complicated, is made difficult by the need to create a common thread with other very recent documents: “Essential Learning”, “National Strategy for Education for Citizenship”, “Profile of Students at Exit from Compulsory Schooling” and “Autonomy and Curricular Flexibility”.

The challenge of an integrated and contextualized reading, interpretation and application of all these documents in schools and the possible need to change others, such as disciplinary plans, student assessment criteria and even changes to the curricular organization and spaces, has brought a whole new bureaucratic reality that is important to uncover in order to act. Operational implementation implies a change in performance and intervention by actors at such a level that it is even seen by many as a paradigm shift in the functioning of the school.

Therefore, in this project we propose to understand whether all this complexity is viable and promotes what each and every one of these documents advocates, or whether, on the contrary, it is inhibiting, due to the bureaucratic burden, impossible to overcome and creating inefficiency in the school organization, as These procedures came to supersede those previously considered excessive.

In this study, data (not yet published) already collected during the preparation of a research project (Alonso, 2018) will be used, with the aim of complementing them with a new collection of data that will make it possible to identify to what extent the most recent Legislation published between 2016 and 2018, mentioned above, worsened or mitigated teaching bureaucracy in schools. This data will be collected through surveys and structured interviews with a sample of teachers, with and without assigned management positions, from the 811 school groups in mainland Portugal, as well as a sample of members of inspection or External Assessment teams and teachers. highlighted in the School Association Training Centers (CFAE) to disseminate training. Digital tools will be used at all stages of development to collect, process and analyze data.

In terms of results, the study uses a longitudinal analysis, over 3 years, to verify whether there will be a simplification of processes and combating dysfunctionalities with the deepening of the functional knowledge of legal documents, on the part of educational actors. Analysis of the impacts of bureaucracy on schools and the mechanisms used to implement changes will make it possible to present recommendations and suggest alternatives that reduce detected bureaucratic dysfunctions and help achieve the objectives of the educational system.