It’s time to discuss fees

I will begin this post with making my position clear: there should be no fees required for Greek children in Cardiff to learn to speak their language. We are a significant minority in the city and the city’s English and Welsh medium schools teach many foreign languages. It is only a matter of planning and coordination to be able to choose Greek as a second language in a School, not so much a matter of resources. This can be the subject of another blog-post, so I am not going to discuss it here.

We are where we are, and we charge fees to our children to learn their language and history. This is against the UNICEF right respecting school principles as I have explained previously but this is what we have. This brings us to the question of the level of the fees. How high do they need to be? Who decided how they are set?

Level of fees

When the School was weeks away from losing the building, the fees increased dramatically to convince the Cypriot Brotherhood who own the building, that the School will contribute to its upkeeping and also to the mortgage that the Brotherhood was still paying. So at that time, the level of the fees increased based on those requirements. A meeting was held to discuss this situation with parents and reluctantly (myself included, although a member of the committee at that time) parents agreed for that change.

New School constitution

The School recently went through a process of transformation into a charity with a new constitution adopted for it. At a previous post criticising that process and the proposed constitution, I raised the issue of how the fees will be set (see “Areas not covered by the current constitution”). The constitution - a core document of the School - does not even refer to teaching fees. The “fees” reference made is only for membership fees which are completely separate to the teaching fees. Therefore we have no agreed framework based on which the fees are set.

Method of calculation

The method for calculating the fees is not shared with the parents. I, of course, applaude the policy of the reduced fees for the second child and no fees for the third child onward. This is something that was agreed years ago and before the School became a charity, but it should have been articulated formally in the School constitution. Other than that, as parents we are not clear on how the fees are calculated. Presumably they are in relation to the cost of the teachers and the rent, but again some of sort of formula needs to be agreed. I urge the School Committee to share the method of calculation with the parents.

Fairness across age groups

There is no fair distribution of fees across ages. I recently discovered that the fees paid by A level students are much higher than those paid by other students. This is completely unfair for the following reasons:

There is no difference between a child who is 15 years old and a child who is 16 years old. There is no material condition that justifies that the 16 year old should be charged higher fees.
The income of a family with a 15 year old child does not magically increase when the child becomes 16 years old, so why charge them more?
The A level Greek is an optional subject, but so is GCSE Greek, or in fact any level of Greek in the UK, so again there is no meaningful difference to justify higher fees.

Although we have no known method of calculating fees, the argument may be that: there are very few students at A level and therefore, in order to cover the cost of the teacher the fees need to be higher. This does not stand as an argument. Consider the following:

The fees are not calculated based on the number of students in each class. I.e. if a class has more students than another class, these students do not pay less per student. E.g. if class X has 5 students and class Y has 10 students, class X students do not pay double the fees of class Y students. So, why should A level be an exception?
Regarding the low number of students: indeed there are few students attending A level lessons. With the disproportional increase of the fees, instead of encouraging more students to study Greek at higher level, we actually penalising them for wanting to do so. We must remember that the students studying A level Greek will grow to become the teachers of the future in the School and these students should be seen as a kind of investment in the community which is absolutely essential.

The least we can do as a School is to be fair to all our students!

The Committee must rectify this unfair situation and charge the same level of fees to everyone, no matter what the year of study is.

A wider discussion on the calculation of fees is required and a modification of the constitution to refer to it is necessary.

The Greek Leek