Ten percent of school population are immigrants
Since 1996, 26 cross-cultural state schools have opened in Greece -13 primary schools, nine junior highs and four senior highs out of a total of 15,174 state schools, or just 0.17 percent of the total. Immigrant children account for 10 percent of the school population. According to the Education Ministry, for a school to be classified as cross-cultural, nearly 45 percent of its student body must be children of ethnic Greeks from abroad or other immigrants. In practice, there are many more cross-cultural schools, since in many schools the children of immigrants form at least 50 percent of the student body. The only difference is that those schools officially classified as cross-cultural have no Greek pupils, who fear lowering their own educational opportunities. According to the Institute for the Education of Overseas Greeks and Cross-Cultural Education (IPODE), there are almost 140,000 foreign children (110,000) and ethnic Greek children (30,000) from abroad, that is 9.5 percent of the total school population. Ten years ago there were only 8,455 children of economic migrants in Greek schools (0.6 percent). According to the Institute for Migration Policy, 66 percent of foreign pupils are from Albania, 10.6 percent from Bulgaria and 4.1 percent form Romania. Most are concentrated in Attica (10.5 percent), particularly in the inner city districts of Kypseli, Petralona, Gazi and Vathi Square, where the percentage is as high as 70 percent. According to the Greek Social Research Center, 58 percent of teachers in Greek schools believe that the presence of foreign pupils does not adversely affect the learning process, and 84 percent of primary pupils and 76 percent of secondary pupils say they have friends of a different nationality to their own.
