Europe's fiscal rules now name which public shortfalls are exceptional. In Greece, the classroom is not one of them.
Joanna
Demopoulou*
* Joanna Demopoulou holds
a PhD in International Affairs and is a former Executive in Residence at the
Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP). Her research examines the legal and
institutional architecture of public authority and governance, focusing on how
law structures, distributes, and constrains public authority across European
and international institutions.
Photo:
Greek parliament; photo credit A. Sivan, via Wikimedia Commons
On 9 October, EU finance
ministers agreed that
Greece may let its spending exceed the agreed path in order to strengthen
energy security. Among the measures Greece intends to finance on that basis is
a €45 million energy upgrade of 246
schools and childcare centres. The upgrade of a school building may count among
the costs allowed to take spending above that path. The teacher who works
inside it may not.
The
decision landed in a school year already short of teachers, with pupils,
students and teachers filling Athens' Syntagma Square and the steps of the
Propylaea to say so. What the protests reject is a particular way of reading
that shortage: that an empty desk belongs to the family that has to live with
it, not to the state that was supposed to fill it.
Greek and
European law answer that question from two different places. The Constitution
gives the state a duty to provide education. The fiscal framework Greece
operates under grants special treatment to other needs and leaves the
shortfalls of education to ordinary budget management. What follows asks how
those two answers coexist, and who ends up paying for the space between them.
The
building and the teacher
Several
weeks into the school year, the secondary teachers' federation OLME estimates that at
least 15,000 teaching posts remain unfilled. In practice that means lost
teaching hours, merged classes, more pupils in every room. The figure is the
federation's estimate, not an official count, and official figures exist only
for a smaller part of the system. For Greece's model and experimental schools,
their own governing committee identified 473 staffing needs for
2026-27, to be met by substitute teachers in the hiring rounds: 199 in general
primary, 190 in general secondary, the rest in special education. These are
needs recorded at the start of the year, not posts shown to be empty today.
Energy
upgrades are one kind of building need, and not the most urgent one everywhere.
The music school of Vartholomio, in the western Peloponnese, has taught its
pupils in prefabricated classrooms since 2008. Work on
a new building began in 2023 and has not been finished. This autumn pupils and
teachers began going home with bites from insects nobody has yet identified,
with redness and itching; some were taken to hospital, and in-person teaching
was suspended and
moved online. According to a parliamentary question tabled
by KKE MPs, the region's health directorate has since found the classrooms
unfit. No European rule is involved here. Nor is Vartholomio alone: in three
municipalities of Attica, a local teachers' association reported in
September 2025 that 73 of 132 primary schools and kindergartens had at least
some prefabricated classrooms.
Who
pays
The gaps
reach the subjects that decide university entry. At the general lyceum of
Kythira, the Piraeus secondary teachers' union announced on 6 October
uncovered hours in three nationally examined subjects, mathematics, chemistry
and economics; a month into the year, final-year pupils had not been taught
them. On Tilos, the mayor wrote to the ministry on 29
September that the five final-year pupils on the economics track had no economics
teacher. Both accounts describe the situation as it stood when they were
written; the posts may since have been filled.
Two cases
do not make a statistic. According to ministry data reported by the Athens News Agency in early
October, after two rounds of substitute hiring, 11 of 13 regions had covered
close to all vacancies in exam-subject specialties. That is real progress. What
Kythira and Tilos show is something the national figure cannot: what an
uncovered post means to the pupils who are living through it, whose exam date
does not move to accommodate them.
The Tilos
letter adds a further detail. The island, the mayor noted, has no tutoring
schools and none of the alternatives available elsewhere. It does not say what
individual families did about that. What it establishes is narrower: the usual
Greek remedy for a missing lesson, paying for it privately, presupposes a local
market that does not exist everywhere. On Tilos, a family willing to pay would
have to look beyond the island, or online.
Where
that market does exist, its scale can be measured. An analysis by KANEP, the
research institute of the Greek General Confederation of Labour, of ELSTAT's
household budget survey found that Greek households spent almost €614 million on private tutoring in 2023, about
95% of it for secondary school pupils. In real terms the sum rose by about 36%
between 2021 and 2023. Households in the three highest income groups devote 3.5
times as large a share of their consumption spending to tutoring as those in
the three lowest. That is a comparison of shares, not amounts, and the gap has widened over the decade.
An
unquantified part of that spending has nothing to do with missing teachers.
Much of it answers the long-standing pressure of the entrance exams,
preparation a family would buy regardless, on top of a school that works.
Tutoring that replaces teaching the school owed is a different matter, and the
figures cannot separate the two; nor does every vacancy become a private bill.
What the figures do show is the channel that opens once a family decides to buy
substitute teaching. That channel is open to those who can pay, and the gap in
what households spend on it has been widening.
In late
September, on live television, Greece's deputy foreign minister, Haris
Theocharis, divided the country's parties into
those that represent the kakomoirides, the unfortunate, and those, like his own
New Democracy, that represent the noikokyrides, householders who manage their
affairs responsibly. A few days later he said the phrase had been a mistake. The
remark is party rhetoric, and it is read here as nothing more. The setting
matters more than the remark. In a country that the Union's own surveillance
found this spring no longer faces macroeconomic imbalances,
continuing hardship is easily recoded as a private failing. The phrase gave
that recoding a name. It did not invent it.
Private
remedies make the recoding easy. Once a lesson has to be bought, a difference
in results can be read as a difference in effort, or in how well a household
manages its affairs. A pupil who falls behind after months without a teacher in
an exam subject may come to be seen not as someone a public service failed, but
as the unfortunate one in the class. Nothing here shows that this has happened
to any particular pupil; what the arrangement does is make that reading
available. There is a further possibility, though the figures cannot establish
it: when a missing lesson becomes a private bill, a failure of public provision
may also become less visible as a political problem.
Elsewhere
I have described an informal constitution of access, in
which rights are formally equal but worth different amounts in practice. In
education the mechanism is more mundane, and for that reason more widespread.
The right to free education belongs to everyone. When the state does not
deliver it, what remains of the right depends on the family's purse, and on
where the family lives.
Time
that does not come back
A right
can be lost through timing as surely as through denial. Writing in EU Law Live earlier
this year about a Greek SLAPP case, I argued that delay can itself become the
violation: a remedy that arrives after the harm is done protects very little.
The analogy has limits; the standards that govern a defamation case do not
transfer to schooling. What carries over is the question of effectiveness over
time. A post filled in November does not return the weeks of syllabus lost in
September and October, and on Kythira the union described a full month lost for the
final year. For those pupils the national exams fall on a fixed date, and the
time between an empty desk and that date is all there is. Teaching delivered
late, for an examination that will not wait, delivers the right only in part.
The
answer
On 21
October, the day of the nationwide education protest, Education Minister Sofia
Zacharaki told the broadcaster ANT1 that her
ministry hears the "real demands" of pupils and that occupying
schools is no solution. She cited renovation work in 2,000 schools and €733 million for
new student halls through public-private partnerships, along
with 53,000 permanent teacher appointments
made since 2019, which she said outnumber
the retirements over the same period. She also conceded that more resources do
not mean every need has been met.
The
figure holds up. The Education Ministry's own Strategic Plan for Primary and Secondary
Education 2025-2029 records 38,409 permanent
appointments for 2019-2024 and a further 10,000 in 2025, and a later report from ERT puts the
running total above 53,000. What the same plan shows, that the broadcast figure
does not, is why a national total answers a different question. It separates
organic vacancies, posts left empty, from functional gaps, which open when the
teacher who holds a post is on leave, seconded elsewhere, or otherwise absent.
Filling the first does nothing for the second. That is part of why the plan
records 51,149 substitute hires in the single school year 2024-2025, alongside
that year's permanent appointments, though not all of them replaced an absent
teacher, since the total also covers programmes such as parallel support. A
national hiring total, however large, cannot show whether a particular post, in
a particular school, was filled when a particular class needed it. The
ministry's planning document and the cases of Kythira and Tilos describe the
same system from opposite ends, and only the second tells a pupil whether there
will be a teacher in the room.
On 5
November the Commission presented the EU Teachers Agenda (COM(2026) 795), a
proposal for a Council recommendation on teaching careers and working
conditions. A July preparatory document for the wider package described such
actions as "not legally binding".
The October Council recommendation on
Greece's expenditure path does something else: it
permits specified energy-security spending to exceed that path. For the
ordinary cost of teachers, no comparable exception exists.
The
numbers
Greece
spends less on education than almost anywhere in Europe. According to Eurostat, general
government expenditure on education in 2024 stood at 3.9% of GDP in Greece,
against 4.8% for the EU. As a share of total public spending, education took
8.2% in Greece, the second-lowest share in the Union after Italy. The OECD's Education at a Glance 2026 puts
total expenditure on educational institutions, from public and private sources,
at $8,600 per lower secondary pupil in Greece in 2023, in purchasing-power
terms, against an OECD average of $15,305 (Table C3.1).
None of
this proves that every vacancy comes down to money. It does describe a system
that has run below the European average for a long time, and has grown used to
families making up the difference.
An
exception with a list
In July
2025 the Council of the EU activated the national escape clause of the
Stability and Growth Pact for 15 member states, Greece among them. The clause
runs for four years and allows a deviation of up to 1.5% of GDP from the agreed
net expenditure path, provided the excess is due to higher defence spending. By
February 2026 it had been activated for 17 states.
For
Greece, the list has since grown. A Council recommendation,
proposed by the Commission in September and agreed by finance ministers on 9 October, extends
Greece's clause to eligible measures that strengthen energy security, capped at
0.3% of GDP a year and 0.6% in total, within the overall 1.5% ceiling. Among
the envisaged measures, the recommendation mentions energy upgrades of public
buildings.
Three
things should be kept apart. The clause permits a deviation; it funds nothing,
and whether a given measure qualifies is for the Commission to assess. The
school upgrades are paid for from national resources and would be lawful
spending with or without the clause. And nothing in the clause prevents Greece
from paying for teachers out of its regular budget. What the clause decides is
narrower, and for that reason easy to miss: which costs may push spending above
the agreed path without consequences under the fiscal rules.
None of
this is an argument against defence or energy spending. In a week of Turkish
navigational warnings south of Rhodes and east of Crete, that argument would be
naive. Nor is there evidence that the clause took teachers out of classrooms;
Greece's budget is decided in Athens, not in Brussels.
Who
decides what is exceptional
The legal
basis is Article 26 of Regulation (EU) 2024/1263. It allows a member state
to deviate from its expenditure path where exceptional circumstances outside
its control have a major impact on its public finances, provided fiscal
sustainability over the medium term is not endangered. The Council decides, on
a recommendation from the Commission, at the request of the member state
itself.
The
strongest objection to this argument follows directly from that text, and as
far as it goes, it is correct. A war on the Union's border or an energy shock
can be described as outside a state's control. A chronic shortage of teachers
cannot. It is the kind of problem a government is expected to solve through
ordinary budgeting, and the clause is designed to keep it there. Defence and a
teacher shortage are not legally comparable circumstances.
Take the
objection at its strongest, and the question still stands. Two legal texts now
speak about the same school. The Greek Constitution, in Article 16, makes
education a basic mission of the state and gives every Greek the right to free
education at every level, in state institutions. The European fiscal framework
recognises defence and, for Greece, energy security as needs that may lawfully
exceed the ceiling. The two texts regulate different things. Treating one need
differently from another under the fiscal rules does not, by itself, create a
legal contradiction with the Constitution, and the Constitution does not
entitle education to a fiscal exception.
The
difference matters all the same, because three separate questions are in play,
and each is answered in a different place. The first is legal obligation: whose
duty is it to teach? The Constitution answers that it is the state's. The
second is fiscal eligibility: which spending may exceed the agreed limits?
Article 26 sets the general conditions, and the Council's individual
recommendations apply them. Ordinary staffing falls outside. The third is actual
access: what happens to a pupil when the lesson is not provided? No text
answers that. It is settled in practice, by what families can afford and by
what is available where they live, and for some, as on Tilos, private
replacement is hardly available at all.
That is
an institutional asymmetry, not a breach. The need the national constitution
names as a basic mission has no fiscal standing comparable to the needs the
Union has agreed to treat as exceptional, and every teacher hired has to fit
under a ceiling that two other needs may lawfully exceed.
Nor is
the list drawn by Brussels alone. The clause is activated at the request of the
member state. Greece asked for flexibility for defence in April 2025 and for
energy security in August 2026. Both
requests were political choices about which needs to present as exceptional,
made within the categories the Union was prepared to accept. An exception for
teachers was never part of that conversation, and under Article 26 as it
stands, it is doubtful that a request for one could succeed. The rules set no
formal hierarchy of public needs. In practice, as Europe rearms for the rest of
this decade, the needs allowed to exceed the spending limits are being named
one decision at a time: defence in 17 member states, energy security in Greece.
The classroom is not among them.
What
the students refuse
What a
right is worth depends not only on its wording but on how institutions classify
its shortfalls: as exceptional or ordinary, as the state's failure or the
user's misfortune. The pupils and students who camped in Syntagma refuse the
second term of each pair. They are asking that a teacher's empty desk and a
crumbling building be treated as gaps left by the state in meeting a
constitutional obligation, not as the misfortune of families that could not
cover them.
A state
can hold a constitutional duty to educate and operate under a fiscal framework
that grants exceptions to other needs without any contradiction appearing in
the texts. The strain shows elsewhere: in a final-year class on an island with
no economics teacher and no tutoring school, in a music school that has spent
eighteen years in prefabricated classrooms, and in the household budgets of
families who can buy what the school did not provide. On paper, the missing
lesson remains the state's to provide. In practice it has become the family's
to buy, where a family can buy it, and it is simply absent where it cannot. The
classroom does not need a place on Europe's list of exceptions; it needs the
ordinary budget to reach it. Until it does, Greek law will go on assigning the
duty to the state while the cost settles somewhere else.
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