With 1,676,800 fewer students by 2035, France is not only facing a demographic decline: it must decide between an accounting reading of schools, made up of closures and redeployments, and an educational ambition which would finally benefit from less busy classes.
The figure has the brutality of a warning. By 2035, France will have 1,676,800 fewer students than in 2025, a drop of 14.2% in school enrollment! Never seen before…
The projection, published by the statistical service of the Ministry of National Education, obviously does not describe a cyclical accident but a more profound movement, already underway and fueled by the decline in births that began since 2010. French schools are now entering a decade of contraction and will have to make choices.
The phenomenon of declining numbers is known, but its announced scale changes the scale of the debate. In the first level (nursery and elementary schools), the drop would reach 933,000 students, or – 15.2%. In secondary education (middle and high schools), it would be 743,800 students, or -13.2%. Primary education is on the front line, because it immediately experiences the decline in births.
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Secondary school will follow with a delay, as smaller generations advance through the system. From the start of the 2026 school year, the shock will already be visible: – 125,400 students in the first level, compared to – 36,200 in the second.
Should fewer students mean fewer classes?
These data draw a long wave that will pass through the entire institution and force us to look differently at the school map, staffing needs, the location of establishments and the distribution of resources.
The Minister of National Education, Édouard Geffray, speaks of a “seismic wave”. The expression is not excessive, because what is at stake is not just a matter of administrative management. It is the very form of the public education service in the territory that is in question. The temptation, for the State, would be to match resources to demographics, and therefore to close classes when numbers fall, to regroup when the threshold is no longer reached, or even to reduce the number of positions to adjust expenditure. The reasoning seems logical, but it is not self-evident.
In rural areas, the drop in students can accelerate intercommunal educational groups (RPI). In urban areas, and particularly where the network is very dense, the question of restructuring the school network has already been raised. If “next year again, we will not close any school without the agreement of the mayor”, “taking into account these figures, this principle is intended to be combined differently”, warned the Minister of National Education.
But mechanically following the demographic curve would amount to deciding a political question as if it were a simple accounting operation. However, the drop in the number of students can also be a rare opportunity to correct an old problem in French schools: overcrowded classes, teaching teams under pressure, insufficient support for the most vulnerable students.
What appears in the projections as a decline in numbers can be read, in another logic, as real room for maneuver.
The opportunity to “reduce the number of students per class”
The teaching unions are not mistaken and are formulating precisely this alternative. For Sophie Vénétitay, general secretary of Snes-FSU (majority in the secondary sector), these projections “should not serve as an alibi” for “a multi-year programming law for job cuts”. “We cannot blindly follow the demographic compass”, due to “social inequalities”, a profession which “has become more complex”, a “need for more adults among young people”, she believes.
Aurélie Gagnier, general secretary of SNUipp-FSU, the leading primary school union, believes that not eliminating positions would make it possible to “reduce the number of students per class”, with, if necessary, a redeployment towards specialized education.
This is where the debate – which will undoubtedly fuel the presidential campaign – becomes thorny. What should demographic decline be used for? To save, or to educate better? To rationalize the network, or to strengthen the quality of supervision? To close structures, or to rebuild a more adapted, more equitable, more sustainable school presence?
The response cannot be uniform and, moreover, the projections themselves emphasize territorial contrasts. Some academies, like Paris, would be very seriously affected. Others would resist more. In the second level, Guyana and Mayotte would even see their numbers increase. In other words, there is not one educational France, but several.
In the end, a social choice
This heterogeneity therefore prohibits automatic solutions and requires, on the contrary, to distinguish the places where the decline justifies a reorganization, from those where it should allow an improvement in learning conditions. Closing classes and sometimes establishments everywhere in the name of demography would be a budgetary convenience. Not moving anything would make no more sense. Between the two, there is a policy to be constructed.
The shock announced by the ministry is therefore less just quantitative than institutional. France now knows that its school population will decline sharply. The decisive question remains: will this decline be absorbed as a reduction in sail, or seized as a chance to finally loosen the grip that weighs on classes, teachers and students? Beneath the coldness of the figures, it is indeed a societal choice that will have to be made for school and, even more so, public school.
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