How each fact is sourced, dated and checked

How the facts are collected

We read each place’s website and note what it says it offers children: ages, the weekly timetable, prices with the period they cover, languages, trial classes and whether a parent has to stay.

An address, a map position or opening hours may also come from the place’s Google Maps listing. A club’s membership of a sports federation may come from the list of member clubs that the federation publishes.

With every fact we keep the address of the page it came from, the date we read it and a short quotation in that page’s language. Portals, news articles, booking platforms, social media and reviews are never used as sources.

Source flags

Each source carries one of three flags: published by the place (its own website), Google listing (its Google Maps entry) or federation list (a sports federation’s list of member clubs).

On a place’s page the flag and the reading date sit beside every fact, so you can see where it was found and how recent it is.

Facts that are not published

When none of the pages we read gives a fact, the place’s page marks it as not published and the list shows a dash. “Not published” describes the pages we read and says nothing against the place.

No gap is filled with a guess. A school class, such as the first year of primary school, is not turned into an age. A price keeps the period the place gives; the only sum we do is the ≈ price per class, which divides a course or package price by the number of classes in it.

Class times and opening hours

Times appear in two columns. Class times are the days and hours of a class, a care afternoon or a camp day, as the place states them. Opening hours tell when the building is open and often come from the Google listing.

A place may be open while no class for a given age is meeting. A row with only opening hours goes below the line, under a heading that says why.

The after-school pages look at weekdays from 16:00 to 20:00: the hours after a school’s all-day programme ends, when most children’s classes in Athens are held. A class counts when one of its groups starts within that window; care counts when its hours cover all of it.

What the directory does not judge

No place, teacher, coach or programme gets a rating, a score or a rank.
Nobody visits the places; every fact comes from something published by them or by others.
Nobody assesses how well children are taught, trained or looked after.
Free places in a class are not tracked; ask the place.
Prices appear as published, with their period and the date read; nobody confirms them with the place.

Corrections from places

If you run a listed place and a fact about it is wrong, missing or out of date, send it through the correction form with a link to the page where the right fact is published.

A correction that the place’s own pages back up is made at the next update and recorded in the record of changes. A place that closes keeps its page, marked as closed, and leaves every list.

A place can also ask to be taken off: choose “Ask for a listed place to be removed” in the correction form and give a contact that shows you run it. The place, its page and its records in the data files are deleted within one month.

Dates and updates

Each place’s sources are read again within 6 months of the last reading. A price published for a period that is over stays on the place’s page with that period, but the filters and the summary line leave it out.

Money

Places pay nothing to be listed, and no payment changes a row or its position in a list.

A place’s page may carry one link to Zartrace, a service linked to this directory and marked as such. Clicks on contact buttons are counted only as totals, with no personal data.

Open data

The whole directory can be downloaded as JSON, one record per place, or as CSV, one row per programme. Both files carry every source, flag and date and state their licence.

Areas, distance and the map

Areas are the municipalities of the Athens basin. The City of Athens is divided into the neighbourhoods residents name, such as Kolonaki, Pangrati, Kypseli or Patisia, and Piraeus into its quarters, such as Kastella and Pasalimani; Peristeri, Glyfada and Kifisia are split into their parts, and municipalities formed by merging older ones, such as Papagou-Cholargos or Penteli, into those former towns. Gerakas, Pallini, Glyka Nera, Acharnes, Ano Liosia, Zefyri and Voula, on the edge of the basin, are areas of their own. A location belongs to the area whose boundary its address lies within.

Distance is measured in a straight line from the point you choose to the place’s nearest location and rounded to half a kilometre. Your location is requested only when you press the button, and it stays in your browser.