As escolas técnicas do SUS: que projetos político-pedagógicos as sustentam?

This paper aimed to explore the political and pedagogical views expressed by managers of five Technical Schools from the Brazilian Unified Health System (ETSUS ), in five regions of Brazil. It also focused on understanding how these institutions organize and structure themselves towards their sustainability. The method searched for qualitative aspects. Data were collected from a questionnaire through the internet, and documents such as: certification of establishment, authorization, Political Pedagogical Project (PPP) and school regulations. The semi-structured questionnaire was directed to the participating institutions, to identify their sustainability within the administrative and finance, technical pedagogical and political dimensions. The technique used to organize and store data and content analysis was the document analysis, according to the methodology proposed by Bardin (2007). Results show that there had been fluctuations in the different dimensions, mainly in the finance administrative fields where the managers' governance was rather fragile. Other results pointed that the technical and pedagogical dimension, with its innovative PPP proposal, is the one that gives more sustainability to ETSUS, making them different from the formal educational system, through the incorporation of management principles to the decentralized curricula, centralized administrative processes and multi-professional acting in the field of health. Its pedagogical strength is mainly translated by the existence of the methodological axis on teaching in service integration, suitability of the curriculum to the regional context, pedagogical use of the working spaces, performance evaluation of the students under services with supervision and pedagogical follow-up, teaching in the work field by a pedagogically qualified professional having the guidelines and principles of the SUS as directions for the course plans. The political dimension was the one which provided more visibility to the school work, also capable of favoring more sustainability. The education/qualification in the municipalities has brought benefits to students/workers and allowed a closer performance to the decentralized areas of management and decision. In the conclusions, the difficulties encountered by the schools were analyzed where there is also the need to correct asymmetries in the technical pedagogical and administrative and finance dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]