Pupil numbers in England are falling
The number of children going through secondary admissions has already peaked. On the Department for Education's 2026 model, published July 2026, the Year 7 cohort topped out in 2024 and is projected to be 89,000 smaller by 2031 — a fall of 13.4%.
Primary is further along. The cohort aged 5 peaked back in 2018 and is on course to fall 19.8% from that peak by 2031.
projected fall in the Year 7 cohort, 2024 to 2031
667,415 pupils aged 11 in 2024, 577,946 projected for 2031
This is England as a whole. These are national projections for England. The release publishes no local authority or regional breakdown, so nothing here describes any particular area. Falling rolls are concentrated in London and the larger cities while other areas are still growing, so nothing on this page tells you what is happening where you live. Every council page on this site carries that council's own appeal figures; none of them carries a pupil projection, because the Department does not publish one.
The bulge moving through the system
The clearest way to see this is by single year of age. The same demographic bulge that filled primary schools through the 2010s is now working its way out of secondary schools — which is why the two curves below are the same shape, roughly six years apart.
View as a table
| Year | Aged 11 | Aged 5 | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 562,782 | 569,614 | Actual |
| 2011 | 557,971 | 582,563 | Actual |
| 2012 | 544,721 | 595,519 | Actual |
| 2013 | 534,801 | 616,029 | Actual |
| 2014 | 531,638 | 641,771 | Actual |
| 2015 | 552,890 | 639,720 | Actual |
| 2016 | 571,137 | 654,206 | Actual |
| 2017 | 583,642 | 667,537 | Actual |
| 2018 | 595,674 | 668,335 | Actual |
| 2019 | 615,553 | 650,771 | Actual |
| 2020 | 639,437 | 638,960 | Actual |
| 2021 | 633,880 | 633,804 | Actual |
| 2022 | 645,770 | 639,329 | Actual |
| 2023 | 661,403 | 630,964 | Actual |
| 2024 | 667,415 | 622,695 | Actual |
| 2025 | 653,948 | 608,769 | Actual |
| 2026 | 642,757 | 587,897 | Actual |
| 2027 | 637,614 | 594,798 | Projected |
| 2028 | 636,283 | 589,709 | Projected |
| 2029 | 617,227 | 559,983 | Projected |
| 2030 | 598,038 | 549,290 | Projected |
| 2031 | 577,946 | 535,972 | Projected |
Age is as at the start of the academic year, so the age 11 line is the Year 7 intake. Figures to 2026 are actual counts from the school census; 2027 onwards are model output.
What it means for appeals
Fewer children in the system means less competition for places in aggregate, and over time that should mean fewer refusals and fewer appeals. That is the honest headline. Three things it does not mean:
- It does not improve your odds at a hearing. A panel decides your appeal on the case in front of it — whether the admission arrangements were applied correctly, and whether the harm to your child outweighs the harm of an extra pupil in the year group. How many children there are nationally is not one of the questions it is allowed to ask. What actually counts as grounds has not changed.
- It does not ease the pressure on popular schools. Demand redistributes rather than falls. When a cohort shrinks, families do not spread evenly across the schools available to them — the undersubscribed schools empty first, and the heavily oversubscribed ones stay heavily oversubscribed. In 2026/27, 38% of England's secondary schools still received more first choices than they had places.
- It does not mean your area is shrinking. See the note above. National and local are different questions and the Department only answers the first one.
Where it plausibly does matter is the waiting list. A year group that starts the year full is more likely to lose a pupil than gain one when the cohort behind it is smaller, and a place that comes up on the list is a place you get without having to win anything. That is an argument for staying on the list, not for skipping the appeal — the two run in parallel and neither costs you the other.
Total pupil numbers
The same story at whole-school scale. State primary numbers peaked in 2019 and state secondary in 2024; by 2031 the projection has primary down 15.1% and secondary down 8.2% from their peaks.
View as a table
| Year | State primary schools | State secondary schools | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 3,963,980 | 2,864,921 | Actual |
| 2011 | 4,002,282 | 2,838,562 | Actual |
| 2012 | 4,079,314 | 2,810,708 | Actual |
| 2013 | 4,174,777 | 2,780,196 | Actual |
| 2014 | 4,281,719 | 2,741,140 | Actual |
| 2015 | 4,376,272 | 2,740,443 | Actual |
| 2016 | 4,479,323 | 2,757,911 | Actual |
| 2017 | 4,557,770 | 2,796,764 | Actual |
| 2018 | 4,607,196 | 2,848,856 | Actual |
| 2019 | 4,624,180 | 2,923,810 | Actual |
| 2020 | 4,618,694 | 3,003,233 | Actual |
| 2021 | 4,574,618 | 3,062,058 | Actual |
| 2022 | 4,571,211 | 3,125,863 | Actual |
| 2023 | 4,567,448 | 3,193,260 | Actual |
| 2024 | 4,537,659 | 3,233,943 | Actual |
| 2025 | 4,479,023 | 3,231,859 | Actual |
| 2026 | 4,396,726 | 3,216,206 | Actual |
| 2027 | 4,294,455 | 3,178,993 | Projected |
| 2028 | 4,185,210 | 3,140,299 | Projected |
| 2029 | 4,085,169 | 3,084,930 | Projected |
| 2030 | 3,995,809 | 3,029,105 | Projected |
| 2031 | 3,925,384 | 2,967,150 | Projected |
Secondary schools are only now going over the top of the curve that primary schools crossed 5 years earlier.
How certain is this?
Less than a single line implies. A projection is a model, not a measurement, and the Department publishes its own range around it by running the ONS population variants through the same model. On the principal projection there are 7,082,000 pupils aged up to 15 in 2031; across the variants the answer ranges from 6,991,000 to 7,227,000.
| Scenario | Pupils in 2031 | Against principal |
|---|---|---|
| High Population | 7,227,000 | +145,000 |
| High Migration | 7,204,000 | +122,000 |
| High Fertility | 7,105,000 | +23,000 |
| Principal | 7,082,000 | — |
| Low Fertility | 7,059,000 | −23,000 |
| Low Migration | 7,015,000 | −67,000 |
| Low Population | 6,991,000 | −91,000 |
The variants move the same model with different fertility and migration assumptions. They are not confidence intervals and the Department does not attach probabilities to them.
The near years are the safe ones either way: a child who will be 11 in 2031 has already been born, so the secondary projection is mostly arithmetic on cohorts that already exist. It is the primary end, which depends on births that have not happened yet, where the variants pull furthest apart.
Source
Department for Education, National pupil projections, 2026 model, published July 2026. Published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Appeal figures elsewhere on this site come from a separate release — see methodology for how the two are kept apart.