Fall in fertility rate becomes big challenge for provincial France

The Occitanie region is witnessing the second-fastest fall in the fertility rate across France.

Only Corsica is higher, because so many young people leave the island for job opportunities on the mainland.

Catherine Sourd from the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Insee) told the BBC the birth rate in Occitanie fell by 8.5% in 2023, compared with 6.5% nationally.

Ms Sourd says the fall is even steeper among women aged between 24 and 35, who are usually the most fertile.

Women are delaying having their first child compared with previous generations and settling into long-term relationships later in life, she says.

At the same time, the current economic uncertainty is weighing on young people’s minds.

The same uncertainty during the financial crisis in 2008 also had a big impact on fertility in France and across Western Europe, with a sharp downward blip in births back then too, Ms Sourd says.

In Colomiers the number of primary school kids has fallen by 10% in the past seven years.

Xavier Vuiller works in educational management at the Victor Hugo secondary school. He and his Spanish wife, Noelia, have just one child, 12-year-old Paolo – and that won’t change.

“My wife was very keen to pursue a personal career… so that she would have the same opportunities as I would have as a man. So we took the time to have a child and just one,” Xavier says.

He adds that the falling pupils numbers will be felt in his own school in a few years’ time as the dwindling number of primary school children move up to secondary schools.

The picture is similar further into the French countryside too, where fertility rates used to be higher. That’s no longer the case either, according to government statistics.