Half of France’s CE2 Classes Have Fewer Than 20 Students; The Decline Since 2018 Isn’t Driven by Private Schools or Rural Exodus

One out of every two CE2 classes now has fewer than twenty students, a figure that would have seemed unthinkable just a little over ten years ago. Since 2018, without exception, every school year confirms the same trend: French primary schools are losing students. Not a little, not sporadically, but year after year, in a sustained and now massive pattern. Faced with this observation, ready-made explanations circulate quickly: the rise of private schooling, rural depopulation, families leaving the big cities. Yet these accounts, however appealing, do not match the numbers. The real reason for this school exodus lies elsewhere, and it strikes much deeper the country’s demographic structure than one might imagine.

Less than 500 pupils per school: the demographic shock no one sees coming

At the latest school year, the primary level counted 6,149,400 pupils, down 121,600 from the previous year across the entire education system. A figure that marked the minds of statisticians at the National Education, as it signaled an acceleration of the phenomenon. But this decline was only a foretaste. For the next school year, the expected drop climbs to 160,000 pupils, including 125,400 in the primary level alone, i.e., a two percent drop in a single year. Scaled to the size of an average school, this concretely means classrooms emptying, enrolments shrinking, and school principals struggling to fill their registration lists.

The most dramatic phenomenon unfolds in the kindergarten’s very first section, the opening rung of the schooling chain and thus the earliest witness to demographic evolution. There, a loss of 46,500 pupils is expected at the upcoming start of the school year, a collapse that is far from anecdotal since it signals, years in advance, what will mechanically ripple through elementary, then middle school. Official ten-year projections are dizzying: the primary level should drop to 5.22 million pupils in 2035, i.e., 933,000 fewer than today, a 15.2 percent decline that overturns the whole map of schooling.

The real culprit isn’t what we think: the fall in births since 2015

To understand what truly empties classrooms, one must trace the timeline back not to an educational reform or a new policy, but to civil registry records. French birth rates began to decline in the early 2010s, and this retreat, invisible at first, eventually hit schools with a delay of a few years, the time it takes for children born in that period to reach kindergarten. This is precisely the mechanism that explains why school enrollments have fallen every year since 2018 without interruption: it is not a temporary anomaly, but the direct and delayed consequence of a structural decline in births.

Data compiled for 2011 to 2025 allow dating this turning point with near-surgical precision. One observes a birth curve bending, and then, a few years later, a school enrollment curve following exactly the same movement, like a wave propagating with a delay. Across both levels, the projection for 2035 shows a cumulative loss of 1,676,800 pupils, i.e., a global decrease of 14.2 percent of the French school population. Put differently, one student in six would disappear from enrollments within a decade. A figure that, on a country scale, represents a genuine demographic transition.

Private schools, rural exodus: why these explanations don’t hold up

In the face of thinning classes, it is tempting to seek blame in more visible, more political scapegoats. The idea that private education would siphon students away from public schooling recurs in public debate. Yet, even if transfers between sectors do exist, they represent only a marginal fraction of the movements observed, far from matching the scale of the phenomenon. Similarly, rural exodus, often invoked to explain the closure of classes in the least dense areas, cannot alone justify a decline so widespread: school desertification does not only strike isolated villages; it also hits metropolises.

This is precisely where the statistical surprise lies. All territories are affected, without exception, though the intensity varies by place. Paris, along with several Eastern and Northern academies, record especially sharp declines, showing that the phenomenon is not limited to rural decline. A single exception nuances this uniform picture: vocational high schools, whose enrollments are expected to rise slightly next year, before stabilizing and then experiencing a decline a few years later. An exception that, by being isolated, confirms the demographic rule that applies everywhere else.

Closed classes, job cuts: what the French demographic collapse really reveals

On the ground, this ongoing decline in births translates into very concrete consequences. The average number of pupils per class has fallen to about 21.3 in 2025, a figure that on paper may look like good news for supervision conditions. But this apparent improvement hides, in reality, a risk of under-enrollment for many schools, forced to merge classes, or even to simply close certain campuses when enrollment becomes too low to justify keeping them open.

This demographic reality now imposes on National Education administrators difficult choices, between post eliminations and redeploying resources toward other priorities. It also raises, more broadly, the question of how the French school network, designed for a growing population, will have to adapt to a downward and durable trajectory. Here is the list of the main expected effects by 2035:

• A cumulative decrease of 933,000 pupils in the primary level
• A decline of 743,800 pupils in the secondary level
• An overall decrease of 14.2 percent in the school population
• Marked territorial disparities, with Paris, the East and the North leading
• Relative, temporary stability on the side of vocational high schools

This statistical tableau hints at a France’s school system changing its face without really communicating on the deeper reasons behind this transformation.

Ultimately, what is truly emptying French classrooms since 2018 has nothing to do with the usual public-private quarrels, nor with the mere decline of rural areas. It is a deep demographic movement, sparked by the decline in births at the start of the 2010s, which is now reaching the classrooms with an almost mathematical regularity. The question remains how the French school system, long organized around managing rising enrollments, will learn to cope with the reverse task, that of supporting a decline that looks set to last.