Enrolling a child in school in Portugal

We finally got our son enrolled in a local Portuguese school. It was very challenging and I hope this information can help your family. These things were required:

  • You must have a permanent address. I don't remember whether a lease was sufficient or if a statement from your "União das Freguesias" is sufficient. 
  • Your must bring school records and they be apostilled (the requirement that they be apostilled varies country to country).
  • Your child must have a NIF.

The procedure was crazy but may be specific to our municipality, I'm not sure. The rule was that if five schools reject your child, then the municipality will force one of them to take your child. The first school said they'd help us organise things, but wouldn't be one of the 'school rejections', because they didn't want to be forced to take a child! Ok. Three other schools rejected us. The fourth accepted us. Be aware that each school takes a day or two (typical nonsense - 'please come after 2pm' but then when you return it turns out that the responsible person has actually already left for the day) and no, you can't check more than one school at the same time. So in the end it took another week, driving to a school each day.

Let me share with you how we learned this:

  • 24th April: we went to the school. Come back tomorrow.
  • 25th April: we were told they were full and that we needed the school records to be apostilled. We contacted his previous school - no, sorry, we cannot re-issue his school records.
  • 27th April: took a long flight (25th and 28th were public holidays so Fedex/DHL/UPS would have taken too long).
  • 28th April: got the documents apostilled.
  • 30th April: we were told he needed a NIF. We immediately drove to the authority that issues NIFs. They told us that we should line up at 5am the next morning because they only did 10 a day. 
  • 13th May: successfully enrolled in school!
Three weeks and a huge effort - what a nightmare!


Good luck!


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