Organisation 

Agrupamento de Escolas de Arrifana, Santa Maria da Feira (Public School) is a group of schools (15 establishments belonging to 5 parishes of the municipality of Santa Maria da Feira), with students from preschool to the 12th grade, with 980 students from 3 to 19 years old. 73 students (7.81%) have Special Needs. We have 106 foreign students of 10 differentetnics and nacionalities, from Roma to Ucranians. 

The Agrupamento works with 90 teachers and 54 are staff. 

Our families have low socioeconomic level (57%) and benefit from financial support by the School Social services. Parents have low qualifications (4th and 6th grade -for mothers, 48.4% and fathers-55.5%) and their incomes are with 10.6% are unemployed.

Most of the families don't give support to their children or recognize the importance of school in their lifes. This group of schools is taking into account different motivations of the students and in order to give more opportunities to students at risk ,since 2007, has extended the vocational program with Vocational Courses (ICT Technician, Commercial, Electrician, Plumber, Beauty Care) and from 2013/2014 the Vocational Courses (Pastry, Craft, Gardening, ICT and Performative Arts). Now we have a vocational course (Youth Technician).

We offer on our curriculum ICT for all students, from 1st grade till 10th grade (National Curriculum). We offer also (school decision) Technologies subject for all students from 7th, 8th and 9th grades as an option of our school (2h every 2 weeks). Students create solar boats, participate on contest of IoT and we have a partnership with a Technological Center of Cork to promote high quality activities and competences in students.

We have European projects since 2009 - Comenius, Leonardo and Erasmus+ and we developed this projects with more than 150 mobilities around Europe and share good practices that we could disseminate after the end of each project. The school since then became more aware of the European citizenship working subjects like culture, water, special needs, history, geography, arts, drama, astronomy, bullying, sustainability and improved our network with school from all europe.

We have Erasmus+ Acreditation School 2020-1-PT01-KA120-SCH-094763 and we are a proactive organization on this field. We host European Voluntary Corps youngsters (Russians, Hungarians, Spanish, French, Italians, English, Turkish, etc) every year with a protocol with an NGO. We apply every year to KA1 (structured courses, job shadowing, invited experts and group students mobility) and until 2023, december we had also KA2 projects. We also host different European groups of teachers and students during the school year for job shadowing activities. We applied to a KA1 Erasmus+ Prize for Good Practices (KA1 2020).