Formação contemporânea do Serviço Social em Portugal

After having been awarded the academic degree of the licentiate (licenciatura) in 1989, there has been a growth and development in Social Work studies. In the beginning of the XXI century the transformations kept happening, with the degree’s integration in the public teaching system and with the developments that the Bolonha Declaration brought to the higher education. In this way we can approach three questions: 1) the higher education reform in Portugal with the process of matching the degrees to Bolonha; 2) the growth and development of the academic degrees on Social Work, having the statistic analysis of higher education in mind; 3) the present relations between the public and private teaching systems in Social Work education and the relations among growth, development and quality, the lack of rules and the process of devaluation that has been a characteristic of this area.