For many years there have been warnings about the declining population of children entering education because of how this will impact pupil admission numbers, funding streams and, ultimately, the viability of many schools.
But in a piece of good news for the sector, the Department for Education has said today that there will be 248,000 more pupils in the system by 2028 than were previously expected. What’s more, most of these new pupils are for the primary sector.
Specifically, modelling now suggests that the state nursery and primary population will be 4,356,551 by 2028 - 176,000 higher than was predicted last year, when the figure was set at 4,180,930.
Healthier primary pupil numbers predicted
This change is spread across the forthcoming years as follows:
- In 2025 the population will fall by 42,000 rather than the 79,000 predicted last year
- In 2026 the population will fall by 42,000 rather than the 81,000 predicted last year
- In 2027 the population will fall by 52,000 rather than the 78,000 predicted last year
- In 2028 the population will fall by 71,000 rather than the 91,000 predicted last year
This does still mean there will be 207,000 fewer pupils in the nursery and primary system by 2028 - a decline of 4.5 per cent from the current pupil population of 4,563,525.
However, NAHT assistant general secretary James Bowen said the fact that the drop will be “less severe is clearly a good thing”, and the difference that the extra pupils will make to some schools will be significant.
Nonetheless, he said the sector must “not lose sight of the fact that pupil numbers are still going down” and this will put “significant pressure” on many schools financially - especially as the impact will be felt harder by some schools than others.
“How this plays out regionally and locally will be interesting to see, as although these are national figures, some areas will be impacted more than others, and we have to be mindful of that,” Bowen added.
Although not all schools will benefit from this healthier prediction, Luke Sibieta, research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said the fact that the drop will be less than expected will make it harder for the new government to cut education funding - something it may have been intending to do.
“The prospects of making savings in the schools budget in an upcoming spending review have nearly vanished,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
Michael Scott, a senior economist at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), said the scale of the revision was “unprecedented” and posed serious questions for the future.
“Schools need to be adequately funded and these new projections suggest it is very unclear what is likely to happen to pupil numbers over the next five years,” he added.
“If the government is assuming that falling numbers will allow it to reduce overall budgets without reducing per-pupil funding, this could need revisiting.”
Furthermore, Jack Worth, school workforce lead at the NFER, also noted on X that “one effect of this will be to push the primary initial teacher training target up a bit” due to a need for more teachers than expected.
Secondary student population boost
Meanwhile, the projection for the secondary student population in 2028 has risen to 3,263,067 - 72,000 higher than the previous estimate.
This boost means that the year at which the secondary system starts to see a decline in numbers has been pushed forward two years to 2028, at which point a fairly gentle 10,000 decline in pupils will occur.
State special schools are also set to see a decline in their pupil population from 2028 instead of from 2027, and only then by around 1,000.
So where did all these new pupils suddenly appear from?
Well, it’s complicated. The DfE explains that when it made its previous projections in 2023 there were “delays in the publication of Office for National Statistics population estimates and projections that took account of the 2021 census”.
This meant that it used different ONS data - its dynamic population model (DPM), if you want to know - that has a different way of projecting populations and that the DfE has acknowledged provided “experimental statistics”.
The DfE’s update also explained that ONS data on migration assumptions have also been adapted to account for “an expected increase in more women of childbearing age” than previously projected.
Despite this uplift in projected pupil numbers, there is no escaping the reality that the state system will see a decline from the academic year starting in 2025, when there will be 14,000 fewer pupils in the system, followed by 25,000 in 2026, 51,000 in 2027 and 82,000 in 2028.
“If this was new data, we’d be saying this was a real concern. So although it feels positive today, we’re not out of the woods,” said Bowen.
Scott also noted that the DfE has reduced the projections offered from nine years to just four.
“This suggests there is even more uncertainty about future pupil numbers,” he said.
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