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Apostolos Vranas, M.Ed.

    The "Frontisteria" are schools in Greece that operate within a rather loose legislative framework. The Greek State categorises them as “para-education”, not “supplementary education”, they have lessons mostly in the evenings and on Saturdays and they cater mostly to the needs of the school students and very little to the adults. By now, they are so common that they even exist in small towns.
    An obvious question is what need do they cover since the major foreign languages English obligatorily for all and a choice between French and German are offered by law in all Greek schools. The answer to that is given exactly by their wide expansion: the Greek mainstream schools do NOT offer a reliable education in the foreign languages so that the vast majority of the students feel compelled to attend a “frontisterion” which offers them a higher-level of instruction and prepares them for certification exams. For the English language UCLES (Cambridge) and Michigan are the most widespread institutions providing such certification covering more than 90% of the market with other minor ones trying to get a piece of the pie.
    Most “frontisteria” rely on the provision of English classes with German, French, Italian and Spanish being secondary attractions. Recently more ‘exotic” languages yet, such as Chinese, Russian and Arabic, have entered the market. Many chains of these schools developed either centrally owned or by the franchise system but few survived the test of time.
    The only serious competition for the “frontisteria” comes from the private lessons. Unfortunately, the same teachers who work in these evening schools often attempt to attract students for private tutoring.
    In his Postgraduate Dissertation, Vaghelis Patsourakis (2007) explored the marketing practices of these privately-owned foreign languages schools and some of the results were stunning! 50 out of a 140 “frontisteria” owners questioned considered that further training for their teachers was unimportant and a further 67 were totally indifferent towards it. Fortunately, the larger the “frontisterion”, the more it encouraged teachers’ training.
    They were mostly indifferent towards any type of educational research and this could be explained partly by the fact that it is not necessary by law for the school-owners to have graduated from University. The idea of in-class assessment for the teachers by their own students is also seen negatively but the few who do this practice it very consciously. Both attitudes depict the practical everyday nature of work for the “frontisteria” or, at least, their owners’ perception of that.
            How are these schools run? Such “advanced” practices as business plan compilation, hiring a Director of Studies for real and not only on paper, seriously targeting clientele among the professionals such as adult students, creative marketing, paying more than the minimum to better teacher are unknown to most “frontisteria” owners.
Most of them decry both the saturation of the adolescent market and also the fact that our student population is decreasing overall due to lower birth rates and the lessening of healthy immigration, yet they never tried seriously to attract adult clientele. One school owner commented: “Why should I engage in something that does not have a wide variety of books with keys and zipnotes?”. The Ministry of Labour has been offering subsidies to companies to train their personnel in various fields, the foreign languages included, some firms attempted such in-service training, yet the “frontisteria” owners never actually pursued it themselves actively.
    As far as marketing goes, the vast majority of these schools operate on word of the mouth and leaflets spread around the neighbourhood, taking pride in their “high success rates” and displaying cut-throat competition slogans such as “low prices” (pricing war) to attract clientele. Part of the problem lies in the fact that most of the “frontisteria” owners take all the decisions on their own or consider that their part-time outsourced accountant is the best business consultant.
    There is an acute shortage of quality management in this business. The owners run their schools mostly by intuition, mostly single-handedly and their main concern seems to be the short-run finances. So, what can one do to select the best one?
The wise practice is to ignore the displays on the windows claiming 95% or 100% success rates, most of these “frontisteria” are the ones that should be avoided. A larger school should be selected rather than the one nearer to home or work as this may offer more options. If the “frontisterio” asks the student to sign promissory notes or any such binding agreement committing him/her to spend the whole term in that school, it would be wise to avoid it.