http://www.aeaugustocabrita.edu.pt/

Agrupamento de Escolas Augusto Cabrita is a regular and vocational group of schools owned by Ministry of
Education and it is situated in Barreiro town at opposite side of Lisbon in the left margin of Tagus river.

ESAC-hight school has annually about 1000 students and 100 teachers and it offers education in scientific, humanities and
vocational courses like informatics, management, marketing and design, events and technologic courses in physical education.
 
Our Agroupment of schools is group of 6 schools from kindergarden to high school and all together we are about
2100 students and almost 200 teachers.
Usually we involve students from our hight school ages between 15 to 18 years old.
 
Barreiro is a town that were developed in the past with industrial development and trains reparation center. Many
workers came to Barreiro in past two centuries and the town were increasing with each time more population. With
colonies auto determination in Africa in 1978 many families of Portuguese and native people, came to Portugal
without money or any income.
 
Barreiro had got many immigrants from colonies in Africa, they came to Portugal trying a better life and scape to the
civil war between different factions that wants to take the power.
 
When Portugal entered to European Union many factories from Barreiro are contributing to produce a lot of pollution
and many of them make sense in a big market of Africa so they closed and had generated big unemployment. Last
decade we add a big movement of immigrants from east of Europe and brazil(old Portuguese colony) that movement
continues.
 
Our school like our society is a melting pot with students from different countries and cultures. Some of them are
trying to do a vocational course to start working or continue studies.

Our school is one in our municipality that accepts students with problems of mobility and some with cognitive
problems. The support of this students to develop them skills preparing them to the work market. ESAC school has
some experience about national and international
 
project work and it has run some international projects successfully. The students come from a low social family
context (often with economic problems due to unemployment) and they are not always motivated to study. They
would like to work but often they lack of motivation in learning.
They are therefore at risk of social exclusion and go out of education system. The teachers try to discover new
strategies to make vocational education attractive for all. 
We have contacts with companies where we send them for training in the end of the course.
 
This project is important to open minds and contact with other cultures, learning to be more tolerant with others, to
motivate them for study.
 
We have teachers that are good in aplying tecnhologies to the classes in any subject using ICT, we can use magic
boards for some classes. We have experts in ICT and electronics for example that are pioneers and some specific
areas.
 
Our students have good skills in english and ICT in general