A 'super' ministry with two secretaries of state for education and one for science – executive summary

The list of 41 Ministers of State proposed by Prime Minister Luis Montenegro was accepted today by the President of the Republic, and the Education, Science and Innovation portfolio includes three names.

Alexandre Homem-Christo has been appointed Deputy Secretary of State for Education, the Secretary of State for Education will be the current Director General, Pedro Machado da Cunha, and researcher Ana Paiva will be in charge of Science.

In the new organization, it is not clear who will take charge of higher education, unlike the previous socialist executives, led by António Costa, and the social democrats, led by Pedro Passos Coelho, who was sometimes Secretary of State for Higher Education, and other times. Science and higher education.

Education, higher education and science were again under the same supervision within the structure of the 24th Constitutional Government, in a new Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation led by economist Fernando Alexandre.

In the previous government, led by António Costa, the portfolios of Education, Science, Technology and Higher Education were distributed among two ministries, each with a Minister of State: Education and Higher Education.

The new Deputy Minister of State for Education is the political scientist and education specialist Alexandre Homem-Christo, who was Parliamentary Advisor to the Directorate of Public Security in the Council of the Republic, within the scope of the Parliamentary Committee for Education, Science and Culture, and Advisor to the National Council of Education.

Currently, he was a columnist for the newspaper Observador, where he regularly wrote mainly about education, often criticizing the policies of former ministers João Costa and Thiago Brandão Rodríguez (minister between 2015 and 2022).

The Secretary of State for Education, Pedro Machado da Cunha, currently holds the position of Director General of Education, on a substitute basis, to which position he was appointed a year ago.

Ana Paiva, now Secretary of State for Science, is a teacher and researcher at the Higher Technical Institute of the University of Lisbon, and has developed her work mainly in the field of artificial intelligence, where she obtained her doctorate.