Economics of A Small School

CFL is a small school with currently about 75 students on roll and about 15 full-time and 5 part-time teachers. The income of the school comes from three sources: the contribution from parents, donations from a global network of well-wishers and the income from our corpus.

The financial philosophy of the school has been driven by two main concerns. Firstly, CFL should be accessible to all parents seriously exploring alternative education, and paying capacity should never be a criterion for admission. Secondly, the school should remain small, with a high teacher to student ratio.

As a result, we have consciously taken certain financial decisions.

Parents do not pay a “fee” towards the education of their child; rather, they contribute towards the annual recurring running costs of the school according to their capacity. We offer an unlimited and uncapped scholarship amount each year. This creates a shortfall between the income and expenditure of the school.

The school exercises great fiscal discipline towards expenditure. We think long and hard and exercise great caution before we incur any expenditure. Teachers’ salaries (75% of our running costs) are not market driven and are relatively modest. Finally, the cost of creating infrastructure on campus is not transferred onto parents.

The annual shortfall and infrastructure expenses are met by our fund-raising efforts and by the income from our corpus. Fund-raising is, therefore, a crucial aspect of the running of CFL.

Our work in education has been possible and meaningful thanks to the goodwill of a global community of friends. We are grateful to all our friends around the world who have supported us so willingly over the years with money, time, books, equipment and encouragement.