The UK’s collapsing birth rate has a silver lining for parents
Key Points
- The UK's total fertility rate has hit a record low, and it is now trickling through to primary schools.
- While this means fewer school places for many, it has led to parents being more likely to get their child into their preferred school.
- The number of schools accept fewer than half of first-choice applicants has also plummeted in the last 10 years.
- This is expected to hold true for secondary schools in the coming years as the country's birth rate continues to crumble and immigration slows.
The UK’s total fertility rate has hit record lows, but there are upsides – it is now easier to get your child into your first choice of primary school.
New research from property firm Hamptons has found that more children are being accepted into their first choice of state primary school, thanks largely to falling birth rates leading to less competition.
According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the total fertility rate per women in the UK fell to 1.4 by 2024, the lowest value on record.
The fertility rate required just to maintain the current population (also known as the replacement rate) is 2.1, which Britain has not achieved since 1970. Instead, Britain’s population has grown in most part thanks to immigration, which has now also fallen in recent years.
This means that while the UK’s economy might be slowly running out of young, healthy workers to support the costs of the country’s ageing populace, those increasingly few children who are born in the UK are more likely to get into the schools they want.
According to Hamptons, the proportion of primary schools that are making offers to 100% of people who put them down as a first choice has risen in recent years, hitting 71% in 2025/26. This is a dramatic increase from the 52% seen ten years earlier.
On the other end of the spectrum, the number of primary schools making offers to less than half of first-choice applicants has also fallen, dropping from 144 ten years ago to 62 in 2025/26.
Both these trends reflect the effect of a sharp drop-off in birth rates after Covid now affecting primary school admissions. Hamptons said it is only a matter of time until this trend works its way through to secondary schools.
This demographic shift is leading to schools cutting places for children across the country – a phenomenon expected only to accelerate, with the number of children in England now set to fall by 6% in the next decade.
Children in the coming decades will not only comprise smaller cohorts than the generations that came before, they will also need to work for a much greater portion of their lives to prevent a pension time bomb.
A recent report found that children in the UK born today would need to work until 75 just to maintain the country’s current level of support for pensioners, with the total childlessness rate set to reach 30%.
