There are 25 communities across Northern Ireland, mainly rural areas west of the Bann, that face an imminent decision. Each is served by a Catholic and a state de facto Protestant primary school, with one or both schools below the threshold of viability and no alternatives nearby.

There are another two communities with secondary schools in the same position.

These so-called “isolated pairs” were identified in a 2024 paper from Ulster University. Its implications are obvious. The affected communities must find a way to share one school, by any of the various means possible, or risk losing both.

The urgency of this was brought home in February by a Stormont report showing pupil numbers are about to collapse.

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The report – a budget strategy from the Department of Education – looked ahead to 2033, the year in which Northern Ireland’s total population is expected to go into indefinite decline, even allowing for immigration.

By that year, primary and secondary school enrolment will already have fallen by 20.5 and 9.5 per cent respectively. The difference between those numbers is due to the decline accelerating as the population ages. The younger the pupils, the fewer of them there will be, with this continuing for the foreseeable future. As a result, an extraordinary 40 per cent of all schools in Northern Ireland will be unviable by 2033, up from a quarter today.

[ ‘It’s not about lessening English’: Belfast’s Gaelscoils see numbers growOpens in new window ]

These projections may be optimistic. They are based on trends from three years ago that have since been revised downwards by Stormont’s statistics agency.

Small rural primaries are the most vulnerable to closure as they generally have the fewest pupils – 105 is considered the minimum viable roll. In addition to the 25 isolated pairs, the Ulster report identified another 41 pairs where both schools are viable, but for how much longer? Beyond that, the entire education system is entering a demographic crisis.

Multiple sectors – Catholic, state, grammar, integrated, Irish-medium – inevitably lead to excess capacity. One in five desks are empty, a vacancy rate that doubled in the first decade of devolution and has been stuck there ever since. Now it is set to double again, unless the whole system finds ways to share.

The 25 communities can be the first victims of this process, or trailblazers for a new mood of pragmatism. The conventional way to bring Catholic, Protestant and other pupils together is through formal integration, where one school in a pair would transform into an integrated status via a ballot of parents.

This could happen with or without the other school’s acquiescence. The worst outcome in this scenario would be both schools competing to become integrated, in a bad-tempered race for survival.

Another option is informal integration, where parents of all faiths and none simply send their children to the local school most likely to survive. Accommodation is made for the religious needs of the incoming pupils, as long as local clergy are willing to provide it.

Examples of formal and informal integration can already be found in villages around Northern Ireland, initiated by state and Catholic schools. However, this is still quite unusual and attempts to replicate it often end in failure.

If communities at risk of losing their schools do not embrace either of these approaches, other models will be imposed upon them.

A new type of integration has been advocated by a major independent review of education, commissioned by Stormont and completed in 2023. It recommended “jointly-managed community schools”, where Catholic, state and other governors would form a new board together to run one school in one building.

Within that building, they could continue to offer multiple “ethoses” by whatever means they agreed to do so. This would differ from formal integrated schools, which have an ethos of their own. It would also differ from the “shared education” model previously favoured by Stormont, where different schools are built side by side to share expensive facilities such as sports pitches and IT suites.

The review proposed creating a commission to deliver a network of 177 jointly-managed community schools by 2031, educating one-fifth of all pupils. That timeline indicates how quickly its authors expected the current system to become unsustainable.

Time was even tighter when devolution was restored in 2024. Paul Givan, the DUP education minister, has largely accepted the review but wants a more powerful commission that can produce a detailed five-year plan for “urgent rationalisation” of the entire schools estate.

He believes making this body independent and evidence-based can “depoliticise” the difficult decisions ahead.

Elected politicians struggle to close schools. It is no coincidence the percentage of empty desks has doubled under devolution. Northern Ireland’s politicians have further struggled to integrate schools throughout the region’s history. Outsourcing the task to experts is the only hope of getting it done, and a sign that Givan is serious.

[ For Northern Ireland, being a bit better than collapse is not good enoughOpens in new window ]

© The Irish Times