Poland loses primary schools due to population decline - newspaper
The falling numbers of school-aged children in Poland has forced more and more district authorities to shut down schools, threatening the cohesion of local communities, Dziennik Gazeta Prawna daily reported on Thursday.
The newspaper said that 4.9 million primary school pupils graduated this year, 700,000 fewer than several years ago.
According to demographic data, the trend is to continue, the authors wrote, as within the next eight years, the number of children aged seven to 14 will fall by around 19.5 percent. By 2060, the decline in this age group is forecast to reach approximately 30 percent.
In their past election year of 2024, local authorities did not decide to close primary schools failing to recruit enough new pupils, but the situation has changed since.
"The following year, the process of closing schools and kindergartens accelerated, and in 2026 some provinces recorded as many as several dozen such applications," the daily wrote.
The central Mazowieckie province leads in terms of school closures, with as many as 30 requests for approval filed by counties this year.
"Since 2023, only one application for school closure was rejected in the Mazowieckie province," wrote the newspaper. "Of those, as many as 44 facilities were primary schools," it added.
The authors argued that local school shutdowns create problems not only for the students who remain in the area, but also for the broader community, as the facilities serve also as local integration centres. However, due to the advancing population decline, the process seems inevitable, they said.
The birth rate remains a key demographic challenge in Poland. According to recent data from Statistics Poland (GUS), in 2025, there were 238,000 live births across the country, 5.4 percent less than in the year before. At 1.07 births per woman, it is among the lowest globally, with the metric in Europe at 1.41, Asia at 1.87, Oceania, including Australia, at 2.13, and Africa at 3.95. (PAP)
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