Portugal’s Participatory School Budgeting program amplifies student voice and builds real-world skills

In Portugal, student voice isn’t just a “nice to have” or a check box. Students learn from an early age in every school in the country that their voice matters.

The federal government funds an annual program that allows students to design and campaign for a project that benefits their school. The program, School Participatory Budgeting (SPB), centres student voice, acknowledges young people’s right to be involved in community life and provides them with the opportunity to foster the skills necessary to exercise those rights and build trust in democratic institutions.

SPB’s primary objectives are to foster the spirit of citizenship and value the opinion and argumentative capacity of students in decision-making processes.

We have that ability to think for ourselves and even if we’re from different ages, we know that our approach or our purpose is always the same: to improve each other’s lives.

Francisca, Secondary school student

How does School Participatory Budgeting work?

Each year interested students between the ages of 13-18 work in small groups to develop proposals that contribute to the improvement of their school. The proposals are then presented to the school population and students vote on which proposal they feel most benefits their school and school community’s immediate needs. Participation in SPB is not mandatory, but more than 90% of public schools in Portugal participate. SPB gives students the opportunity to propose and vote on general ideas to improve an aspect of their school community using an allocated portion of the school’s annual budget.

Schools are provided with a set budget by the central government for this initiative, which is indexed to the number of students in the school. In schools with fewer than 500 students, the minimum guaranteed amount is 500 euros. For larger schools, the government provides an additional euro per student. Along with that funding, it is not uncommon for schools or groups of schools to allocate additional funds and sometimes municipalities or parish councils contribute to the available budget.

Participatory school budgeting gives pupils the opportunity to participate according to their ideas, their preference and their wishes, in the development of projects contributing to the improvement of their schools.

Paulo Peixoto, Sociologist and Professor at University of Coimbra

The SPB process takes place annually in stages:

• January: Schools present the initiative to the school community and the students start working on proposals
• February: Students develop and submit their proposals
• Early March: Students work with the school and other partners to debate and discuss the proposals. The aim of this phase is to clarify the proposals and try to adjust the proposals to the amount allocated to the school’s participatory budget. These meetings can lead to the improvement, merging, or withdrawal of proposals.
• Mid-March: Students campaign for their project
• March 24^th – National Student Day: Students vote on proposals
• March to May: Planning for implementation of winning proposal by the school
• May to December: Implementation of proposal

What kinds of skills are learned?

Cooperating and collaborating is really important. It’s one of the things that we gained the most. But also trust in each other that we need to have in order to continue with these initiatives and actually implement them in the world.

Francisca, Secondary school student

SPB is a key instrument in promoting civic culture and participation from an early age. The initiative centres student voice throughout the process. Even students who do not want to create proposals can still participate in school decision making by voting for the proposal they feel is most beneficial to the school community. Students who choose to submit proposals must work in groups to develop proposals which helps them learn to cooperate and collaborate with others to execute their ideas, along with learning key skills related to finances and budgeting. Students also need to effectively communicate their proposals to the student body to gain votes. More generally, the initiative allows students the opportunity to think independently and be conscious and empathetic towards the needs of their school community.

I think that is very important because students develop financial literacy, language skills, speaking skills, and they learn how to manage conflicts…they make decisions. There is a growing sense of belonging, and each of them knows for sure that they can make a difference.

Ana Cohen, School Director, Portugal

What kinds of proposals are submitted?

In the initial years of implementation, proposals were mostly focused on purchasing new equipment and improving leisure and sociability spaces in schools. More recently, the central government sets an annual theme for SPB proposals, such as formal and non-formal education, accommodation, health, environment and sustainable development. The theme for 2024 was inclusion and well-being, with an emphasis on specific actions that encourage the inclusion of everyone, but especially the most vulnerable students in the school and those most affected by the pandemic.

Examples of winning projects:

• School radio
• School events
• Purchasing equipment: such as sound systems and greenhouses
• Improvements to students’ social spaces
• Supports for extracurricular activities

The whole school environment has changed in the last five years. And it was a big shift, a really dramatic shift as far as student agency is concerned because it’s up to them to decide to make a decision not only about this, the educational path, but about a school, about the community, about the region…And they are developing the project around these topics very easily because they think they can change. They can be really changemakers.

Ana Cohen, School Director, Portugal

What are the challenges for a model like this?

SPB has been running for 7 years and has evolved over time. Through trial and error, the government understood that centralized SPB would be short-lived, particularly in the absence of methods and policy that support it. To address this issue, over the last few years they have been moving from the centralized model to the local municipal model and even school management is becoming municipal as they are recognizing local initiatives work better at improving participation.

Ensuring that student autonomy is maintained is another challenge. Student autonomy is an integral part of this innovation, but as the initiative involves younger students there are times when parents and parent associations want to be involved in the process. However, once parents see the final results, they are able to understand the importance of the program.

What kinds of policies support this kind of initiative?

School Participatory Budgeting (SPB) initiatives began in Portugal as part of a wider national shift towards open government policies that were rethinking democracy and civic participation in the country. This initiative was a key step towards boosting the participation of schools and local municipalities in open government. Open government policy is a response to the increasing pressure for more transparent and accountable systems in the face of rapid societal and technological advancements.

The country has been experimenting with these strategies for more than 20 years, and by the time SPB was introduced in 2016/17, there were already more than 100 other experiments taking place all over the country. SPB is also only one component of a larger national strategy to promote civic education and democracy. Other initiatives include the Youth Parliament, introduced in 1995 and still running, and Portugal Participa, a participatory budget initiative aimed at municipalities introduced in 2014.

You need to have a strategy, a national strategy, but then you need to make things concrete… Schools are different. When I used to go to schools and some of the students and some teachers are showing the prime minister or me their budgetary exercise, I was struck by the fact that they already think that it’s their problem… It’s not mine anymore.

Tiago Brano Rodrigues, Former Minister of Education

How does this make a difference to democratic attitudes and engagement?

Universally accessible, compulsory, free public education is considered the cornerstone of any democracy because it ensures that the whole population, and not just the privileged, have the knowledge, skills, and capacity to participate in elections and civil society.

For Portugal – which only became a democratic country in the late 1970s – promoting democracy and citizenship in schools is essential for building sustainable attitudes toward civic participation.  Thus, programs like School Participatory Budgeting, with its hands-on approach to experiencing democracy, are vital for individual students and for the whole of society. There is extensive evidence to show that participation in and learning through community engagement has a much more lasting effect than the usual form of passive learning that many students experience.

Over the past 15 years a pervasive consensus about citizenship education has been growing across the democratic world. That consensus consists of four central elements: a sense of crisis – or, more accurately overlapping crises – about the state of democratic citizenship (particularly the levels of engagement or disengagement amongst young citizens); a belief that the crises can and should be addressed by effective citizenship education; a commitment to a largely civic republican conception of citizenship emphasizing both civic agency and responsibility; and a move toward constructivist approaches to teaching and learning as best practice in citizenship education.

Dr. Alan Sears, University of New Brunswick, for People for Education, Measuring What Matters

Why does it matter?

A democratic and cohesive society relies on people understanding the impact of their behaviour and decisions on others and having the capacity to play an informed role in the affairs of their society.

Citizenship education supports students’ capacity to be responsible, active citizens in their schools and communities, and it allows them to become contributing members of a democratic society.

Now, more than ever, Canada needs an informed and engaged citizenry, and our publicly funded schools are the best place to ensure that all students, and not just some, graduate with the capacity and the sense of agency that will allow them to fully participate in our democratic future.

Read more:

• IIEP-UNESCO supported case study of School Participatory Budgeting
• https://etico.iiep.unesco.org/en/open-government-education-open-budgeting-participatory-school-budgets-portugal
• School participatory budgeting in every school of the country? Lessons from a national initiative to spread citizenship education  Pedro Abrantes
• Civic Education across Countries: Twenty-Four Case Studies from the Iea Civic Education Project. Torney-Purta, J., J. Schwille, and J. A. Amadeo. Amsterdam: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 1999.
• People for Education, Citizenship domain paper, Measuring What Matters
• Portugal’s National Strategy for Citizenship Education