Education and training courses in basic education

This manuscript addresses the problem of the vocational option in basic education (CEF-Cursos de Educação e Formação Ensino Vocacional). Although these courses help to reduce school failure and drop-out rates the research emphasises that CEFs are more advantageous than the (ideological) vocational option. However the CEFs cannot continue to feed the needs of the school without taking into account the preferences and profile of the students nor can they be stigmatising from the point of view of an opportunity to reconcile with the school when students are placed in a kind of storage room as if they were the refuse of the school or in a ghetto for the problematic and those born into the arms of society's misfortune.