Olaias School Cluster

Olaias School Cluster comprises 6 school establishments from kindergarten to elementary and lower secondary education: Escola Básica 2.3 das Olaias, which is the cluster’s head-school; Escola EB1 and Jardim de Infância do Armador; Escola EB1 Engenheiro Duarte Pacheco and Jardim de Infância do Beato; and Escola EB1 Ator Vale and Jardim de Infância S. João no. 2. The cluster offers multiple educational programmes, namely several alternative courses with professional and vocational learning components. Nowadays, more than one thousand students attend the Olaias School Cluster (kindergarten, 183; 1^st to 4^th grades, 494; 5^th and 6^th grades, 222; 7^th to 9^th grades, 263), whose activities are supported by a staff that includes a total of 147 collaborators (among teachers, 109, technicians and assistants, 38). The cluster is currently part of a Priority Intervention Education Territory (TEIP), a programme conceived by the Ministry of Education in order to support schools inserted in pre-identified social problematic areas. Within this framework, the TEIP Programme intends to prevent and to reduce early school leaving and absenteeism rates, and well as to promote the development of strategies to lower indiscipline and to upgrade students’ academic results. Nowadays, the cluster is considered a school of reference and/or benchmark as regards supporting blind and low vision students. The Olaias School Cluster’s educational project endorses the idea of “Education in Multiculturalism”, a leitmotif that intends to serve a population of 278 foreign students, from 33 different nationalities.