Portuguese basic education is undergoing an important curriculum reform. The main issues of this reform are (i) to develop school's and teacher's autonomy related with curriculum design and implementation, (ii) to counterbalance the subject matter tradition by introducing non disciplinary curricular areas and (iii) to focus pupil's learning on the development of competencies. Experiences took place in several schools before the generalization of innovations in the school year of 2001/02. In some cases, experiences were followed by research teams from different universities and polytechnic schools. This paper aims to analyse the results of those case studies with two main purposes: to illuminate the critical questions raised by the building of a school focused curriculum within a framework of centralized educational administration and to suggest the need for a more specialized initial and continuing education of teachers in the field of curriculum development.