This Country Closes More Than 700 Schools As Birth Rate Drops, Name Is…

Greece is closing more than 750 schools this year as the country faces a sharp fall in birth rates. The closures show over 5 per cent of all schools nationwide and go beyond remote villages, also affecting parts of Attica, which includes Athens. Officials are calling it a sign of a “collapse in demographics.”

“Classrooms reflect the state of our maternity wards and the number of births, which, unfortunately, has been declining for decades in our country,” said Education Minister Sofia Zacharaki, reported The Financial Times.

According to the report, government data shows that primary school enrollment has dropped by more than 111,000 in just seven years, a fall of 19 per cent since 2018. “The fall is happening very fast, and in Greece it is very steep,” said Alexandra Tragaki, professor of economic demography at Harokopio University in Athens. She explained that fewer people of childbearing age today means fewer children in the future.

This year, 766 of Greece’s 14,857 schools will close for not meeting the legal minimum of 15 pupils. Most are primary schools, though numbers are shrinking at all levels. While some schools may reopen within three years if pupil numbers recover, most closures are permanent. Exceptions are made for islands near Turkey and border areas, where schools stay open even with very few children.

One rare case is Pserimos island in the Dodecanese, where the school will reopen for the first time since 2009 to teach just five children. 

Greece’s population crisis dates back to the debt crisis of the 2010s. Since 2011, deaths have outnumbered births every year. Between 2001 and 2021, the number of women aged 20–40 fell by 31 per cent. Many educated Greeks also left the country for better opportunities abroad.

By 2022, births fell below 80,000 a year, while deaths nearly doubled that figure. Fertility has dropped to 1.35 children per woman, among the lowest in Europe.

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