NI to have more pensioners than school children by 2030

There will be more pensioners than schoolchildren in Northern Ireland by 2030, new official projections suggest.

Figures from the NI Statistics and Research Agency (Nisra) show that between 2022 and 2030 the pensioner population will have grown from 315,000 to 356,000.

The number of children, aged 15 and under, will have fallen from 389,000 to 349,000.

The reduction is driven by long term trends of increased life expectancy and falling birth rates.

A rapidly aging society is likely to have significant implications for public services.

The impact on schools will be felt over the next decade.

At Dunseverick Primary on the north Antrim coast the head teacher, Leanne Smyth, has witnessed demographic changes unfolding in real time.

Dunseverick has 94 pupils, a healthy and sustainable number for a school in a sparsely populated rural area.

But that is still down by more than a third compared to when Ms Smyth began working at the school 19 years ago.

She has also noticed how the typical family size has changed in that time.

“Back when I started we had quite a few families with four siblings, now we’re lucky if we get a three sibling family. The majority of our kids are two siblings or an only child.”

The falling number of children means that schools are having to market themselves to parents in a way that was once unheard of.

“When I started there was no such thing as an open night for a primary school. That’s now one of our main events in the school year.”

Gareth Hetherington, who leads the Economic Policy Centre at Ulster University, said Stormont will be faced with decisions about closing or merging schools.

He said it is understandable that communities celebrate when their local school is saved from closure.

But he added that spreading the available funding too thinly is making life harder for schools which have the numbers to remain viable in the long term.

“Principals in those schools are being put in increasingly difficult positions to try to make ends meet,” he said.

The other side of Northern Ireland’s demographic changes can be seen in County Tyrone at the Dungannon West Recycled Teenagers group.

It has been active for 18 years and works to reduce isolation and loneliness among older people in the area.

Chairperson Sean Kerr said: “We have a right good time, the only problem we have – we’ve only four men – but it’s been a great club. We try and go away two or three times a year.”

Frances Hamilton is a new face at the group. She’s almost 69 and says it’s important to make the effort to keep active.

“What happens to people when they get to a certain age, they lie down in the house and forget there’s a life outside,” she said.

“You need to remember there’s more to life than sitting in the house and you only get into a rut.”

There will be more people like Mr Kerr and Ms Hamilton in Northern Ireland’s population in the coming years.

The Nisra projections suggest the number of people aged 65 or over will have grown by more than 25% between 2022 and 2032 from 335,000 to 425,000.

An older population means health spending will inevitably continue to account for the majority of Stormont’s budget.

Analysis by the UK Office for Budget Responsibility suggests that spending on hospital services for adults remains broadly steady until they reach their mid-40s when it starts to rise in a series of increasingly large steps.

A recent study by the Nuffield Trust, a health think tank, concluded that “society will have to decide how far it is willing to pay higher taxes in order to accommodate the desire for more health spending”.

It added that at a Northern Ireland level it “underlines the need to extract as much service quality and quantity for every pound of available spending by tackling inefficiencies where they can be found and reduced”.