As escolas e a autonomia – conclusões de um estudo de caso

The Portuguese public schools governance has, nowadays, a "regimen of autonomy, administration and management". However, the heavy interference of the centralizing State and the scarce alterations that have been occurring in the administration of the Portuguese public schools has turned the autonomy into a wide dealt subject within academic discussion, in spite of its reduced practical application. We have revisited the course that the schools had to go through in order to be able to establish a contract of autonomy with the ward, ever since the external evaluation up to the celebration of an autonomy contract. In other words: a "contracted" will. We have proceeded to the empirical study, resorting to a qualitative inquiry methodology and we have carried out a study in a secondary school, situated in the north of Portugal, that had celebrated in 2007 an autonomy contract, in order to try to understand the impact of the governance per contract in schools and the conceptions of the educational performers on contracted autonomy.