What the Concurso Externo de Docentes is
The Concurso Externo de Docentes is the Portuguese national recruitment competition through which the Ministerio da Educacao hires teachers into the permanent staff of public schools (the Quadros). It is run by the Direcao-Geral da Administracao Escolar, the DGAE, which is the arm of the ministry responsible for the human resources of the state school network. The concurso is opened by an aviso de abertura published in the Diario da Republica and on the DGAE portal, and the entire candidatura is transacted electronically through SIGRHE, the DGAE’s human resources platform. Direct fetches to dgae.medu.pt and dge.mec.pt were not confirmed from this environment when the page was written, so the figures on this page should be re-verified against the aviso de abertura before an aspirant relies on them for a candidatura.
Concurso externo versus concurso interno
Portugal runs two parallel teacher concursos. The concurso interno is restricted to teachers who are already docentes de carreira, that is, already integrated into a Quadro de Agrupamento or a Quadro de Zona Pedagogica, and who wish to move between schools or zonas pedagogicas. The concurso externo, in contrast, is the entry route for teachers who are not yet integrated into any Quadro, including newly qualified teachers and those working under successive fixed-term contracts. The 2026 concurso externo, per public reporting, opened on the order of 8,465 vacancies, one of the larger single-year openings the country has seen since the recovery of teacher recruitment after the austerity years.
Grupos de recrutamento
The Portuguese teaching corps is organised into grupos de recrutamento, each identified by a numeric code and covering one subject area at one educational level. A candidate applies within one or more grupos for which they hold the qualifying habilitacao profissional under Decreto-Lei 79/2014 and the successor habilitacoes legislation. Common examples include grupo 110 for Ensino do 1 Ciclo do Ensino Basico, grupo 300 for Portugues at the 3 Ciclo and Secundario, grupo 500 for Matematica, and grupo 550 for Informatica. The list of grupos, and the exact habilitacoes that qualify a candidate for each, is fixed by the ministry and republished with each concurso.
Provas de Aptidao Pedagogica
Most candidates enter the concurso on the strength of a qualificacao profissional already earned through a masters in teaching or an equivalent route. Where a candidate does not hold that qualificacao but satisfies the academic prerequisites of a grupo de recrutamento, they may be required to sit a Prova de Aptidao Pedagogica, the PAP, which is a pedagogical aptitude assessment specific to the chosen grupo. The PAP is not a written exam of the sit-in-a-hall kind familiar from other countries. It is an evaluation of pedagogical aptitude, applied under DGAE regulations, and its result is what allows the candidate to be ranked in the graduacao profissional for that grupo.
Colocation cycles and Quadros
The colocation stage is what makes the Portuguese concurso distinctive. Candidates order their preferences over agrupamentos de escolas and Quadros de Zona Pedagogica, the QZP, which are geographic groupings of schools. The system then runs a national colocation cycle that matches candidates to horarios (teaching posts) according to their graduacao profissional and their expressed preferences. Successful candidates are integrated into either a Quadro de Agrupamento, tying them to a single agrupamento, or a Quadro de Zona Pedagogica, tying them to a zona within which they may be assigned to any agrupamento each year. This national placement mechanism is the reason a Portuguese teacher can compete for a permanent post anywhere in the country without a separate application per school.
Bolsa de Contratacao de Escola
Horarios that remain unfilled after the national concurso are offered through the Bolsa de Contratacao de Escola, a fallback mechanism through which individual schools recruit directly for the school year. Contracts issued through the Bolsa are typically fixed-term and do not, in themselves, integrate the teacher into a Quadro. For candidates seeking their first teaching post, participation in both the national concurso externo and the school-level Bolsa is common and often necessary in grupos where competition is high or vacancies are scarce.
Where to check the current cycle
The definitive references are the aviso de abertura published in the Diario da Republica and the corresponding pages on the DGAE portal at dgae.medu.pt, complemented by the pedagogical policy pages at dge.mec.pt. Candidates in the Portuguese diaspora should also consult the Portal das Comunidades Portuguesas maintained by the Ministerio dos Negocios Estrangeiros for guidance on documentation issued abroad. The figures on this page require re-verification against those official sources before any inscription decision.