Fees for 2026-2027

The fees of the Greek school for 2026-2027 have increased by £2/per month. Given the inflation and the increase in the cost of living, on the one hand, £2 is a reasonable increase, on the other hand, families have an extra cost to cover alongside the rest. I am not complaining for the level of the £2 increase this year.

A history of fee changes

Over the past 5 years these are the fee changes for one child per year:

14 Sep 2022 (for academic year 2022-23): £300
30 Aug 2023 (for academic year 2023-24): £300 → £350
26 Sep 2024 (for academic year 2024-25): £350 → £400
no date (for academic year 2025-26): £400
27 Jul 2026 (for academic year 2026-27): £400 → £420+£10=£430

From £300 per year in 2022, we are up to £430 per year in 2026. If my calculations are correct this is a 43% increase over 5 years. Salaries have not increased by 43% during this period, so no matter how one looks at it, the Greek school has become a lot more expensive.

Why?

Because:

1) We lost the teacher whose salary was paid by the Cypriot state, and 2) the Greek-Cypriot Brotherhood has increased the rent for the school building.

What does a school need? A teacher, and a building to hold lessons. (I am planning a blog post to request that the mayor of Cardiff, who is also Cypriot, provides a building and a teacher’s salary for the Greek school - more to come - but back to the point now).

I am not blaming the school committee for the high cost of the fees. However, some things need to be discussed.

Punishing A level students

The £30 increase this year is at a level that most families may be able to absorb when paying school fees. However, the exception is families whose children move from GCSE to A level. For those families the increase is not £3 per month. It is at least £20. Or if they are unlucky to be in a small group of students, it is £35 per month. How is this fair? Why do these families have to pay double the fees, only because their child wants to do A level Greek? It is completely unreasonable to expect these families to pay such higher fees from one year to the next.

Following Brexit, we have struggled to recruit teachers because of the recently-introduced limitations in the UK for hiring staff from abroad. We cannot rely on Greece and Cyprus to source teachers. We need to look into our community for that. Our own children should and can follow A level Greek and go on to get proper qualifications to teach Greek, so that we can feed the school with teachers from our own community. But, with this unfair fee structure for A level, instead of encouraging them to do so, we penalise them by asking them to pay more and making families think twice on whether the cost is worth it.

The school committee needs to look ahead and encourage students to continue high level Greek study. Bring up the teachers of tomorrow.

The fees for A level Greek must be the same as the fees for every other class.

I brought this up last year but I was told that the fees had already been set and could not change mid-year. I brought it up again this year, but the committee has stayed silent.

Decision making on fees

Which brings me to the main point for this blog-post: How are the fees decided? Who decides about the fees? Under what regulations? The constitution of the newly formed charity for the school does not specify how the decisions about fees are made. I raised this issue in my blog-post on the problems of the constitution (see first point under Areas not covered by the current constitution), but it was ignored. The ultimate decision-making body of the charity is the membership, but it has not met to decide anything.

I can only presume that it is either the trustees of the charity or the school committee that have decided for the fees. In either case, a top down decision without any participation by those who actually pay the fees continues to promote a transactional model of a service that is being sold to parents/consumers. This is not at all a healthy position for a community to be.

Proposal for deciding on fees

I am not suggesting that everyone needs to decide about everything, but setting the level of fees is a really important issue as it involves exchange of money. One way to go about it is to setup a fees committee chosen by the membership to make proposals each year in collaboration with the treasurer. Then these proposals are brought to an AGM and are decided by voting by the members.

The introduction of substantial fees when the school was at risk of losing the building was done following a proposal by the then school committee and a vote at a meeting with all parents.

Stripping the community from any agency is not appropriate. Parents must be involved in decision making.

The Greek Leek