SWANSEA: Falling birth rate to leave 8,000 primary school desks empty by 2032

Eight thousand primary school desks across Swansea could be sitting empty within six years. That is more than one in three places, and the children to fill them have not been born.

The city is on course to lose 5,350 pupils by 2032, roughly one in six of everyone in a Swansea classroom today, according to forecasts Swansea Council will put in front of councillors on Thursday.

Nurseries feel it first. The intake is set to shrink by more than 700, from 2,506 to 1,798, and every single primary year group is projected to be smaller by 2032, with Year 3 losing the most, from 2,622 pupils to 1,866.

The 90-pupil line where a school loses its deputy head

The schools that will feel it hardest are the small ones. Dip below 90 pupils and a Swansea primary stops being funded for a deputy headteacher, and several already sit at or near that line, the council’s report says.

One secondary is close to the council’s 600-pupil danger mark too. The report expects a “significant increase” in the number of schools crossing those thresholds by 2032.

Fewer pupils means less money, because most of a school’s budget follows the child. The report spells out what happens next in a shrinking school: higher cost per pupil, fewer staff to move around, more pressure on the head, and a thinner curriculum.

Secondaries get a safety net called falling-roll protection when numbers drop by more than 10% in a year. The council calls it short-term help that “does not address longer-term demographic decline”, and primaries get nothing like it.

Church schools shrink fastest

Church schools take the biggest proportional hit. Their primary rolls are projected to fall from 1,128 to 805, close to 30%, with faith secondaries losing 79 of 1,274 pupils.

English-medium primaries lose 3,237 pupils, almost a quarter. Welsh-medium primaries drop by 408, around 17%, but Welsh-medium secondaries barely move, down 43 from 1,951.

Sixth forms are the one place the numbers hold, with Year 12 projected to edge up from 729 to 750.

Mergers and shut classrooms ‘where required’

No school is named and no closure is proposed. But the council is not ruling anything out either.

Its list of responses includes “removal of surplus capacity where possible”, turning spare space over to community use, and drawing up “future school organisation options where required”. The plan those options sit under lets the council expand, shrink, merge or open schools.

The council also finds an upside. Fewer children could mean smaller classes, more money per pupil, and more room for the specialist places it is short of, on top of Ysgol Calon Lân, the 350-place special school planned for Morriston.

That matters because additional learning needs are rising while pupil numbers fall, and the report says those pressures “remain regardless”. Earlier this month councillors voted to demand the city’s £44m share of Wales’s £322m ALN windfall, with the council saying more than 60% of schools in parts of the city were already in the red.

Secondaries have been protected. That is about to end

Swansea’s high schools have been insulated so far. Since 2018 they gained 1,561 pupils as bigger year groups moved up, while primaries lost 1,511, and the report says that is “now reversing” as the smaller cohorts reach Year 7.

Today 19.6% of primary places are unfilled, about 4,196 desks. By 2032 the forecast is 38%, or 8,164. Secondaries go from 10.5% empty to 18.9%, from 1,735 places to 3,117.

The forecasts leave out any children from new housing, which the council says has made past predictions less accurate, so growth from the Local Development Plan or the Swansea Bay City Deal could soften the fall. Welsh Government figures shared with council planners suggest the school-age population across Wales will drop 8.1% between 2021 and 2031.

Nothing is decided when the Education Scrutiny Performance Panel meets at the Guildhall at 4.30pm on Thursday; the report is “for information only”. It was signed off by cabinet member for education and learning Robert Smith.

Director of education Helen Morgan-Rees approved it too. In June she listed the declining birth rate among ten key issues facing Swansea’s schools this year, alongside funding, attendance and additional learning needs reform.