VAT on private schools may cause pupil exodus, say parents

There are fears that almost a quarter of the 85,000 pupils at private schools in Greece could leave if the government does not scrap plans to impose a 23 percent value-added tax rate on non-state education.

The head of the coordinating committee for parents who send their children to private schools, Ioakim Kallivrousis, told Kathimerini on Thursday that there are estimates as many as 20,000 children will be withdrawn from their schools if VAT is added to their education fees. He did not give details about how the calculation was made.

Kallivrousis’s comments came as Education Minister Nikos Filis failed to clarify whether the government would abandon the measure, as it had promised before the September 20 elections.

“It is an issue that we want to approach from the perspective of finding alternative measures,” he said in reference to the government’s desire to replace some of the bailout terms with different proposals. “We know that the 23 percent VAT rate will not be a burden for our well-off fellow citizens but for working-class families who send their children to private tuition classes.”

However, Filis suggested that the government’s chances of finding alternative measures to raise the 350 million euros in revenues for this year and next are slim. “If we crack four or five big tax evasion cases, we can find the revenues needed not to impose VAT on schools,” he said.

There are 239 private schools in Greece, employing around 30,000 people – 10,000 teachers and 20,000 administrative staff.