Where do the children go to school?

The country

From 100 to 85

In 2000–2005 Romania had about 100 pupils in grades 1–4 for every 100 children born 7 to 10 years earlier. They were not exactly the same children, since some repeated a year and others had left, but the two counts covered each other. By 2011 the ratio had reached 94. From 2012, when the preparatory year was introduced and the cohort grew from four to five birth years, the ratio is measured a little differently and has since stayed between 84 and 89. In 2025 it is 85.

The lower-secondary line is easier to read, because its window never changed: four birth years, children aged 11 to 14, grades 5–8. Between 2004 and 2010 the country had, on average, 93 lower-secondary pupils per 100 children born; between 2012 and 2016 it had, on average, 89; in 2025 it has 83. The children missing from this line were mostly born between 2011 and 2014, the years after Romania joined the European Union, when young families were leaving in large numbers. A child born in Bârlad and raised in Turin remains, in the registers here, a child born in Bârlad, but never sits in a classroom in Bârlad.

A simple test shows how much the first source weighs. Since 2012 INS also counts births by the mother’s usual residence, the place where she actually lives. For children born between 2015 and 2019 this second count gives 1,039,823 children, 2% fewer than the count by registered address. The ratio only rises from 85 to 87, so this correction changes the national figure little. At locality level, though, the difference can be enormous. In Gârla Mare, a commune in Mehedinți, 290 children were registered between 2015 and 2019 by the mother’s address and only 70 by her residence; the primary school has 43 pupils. By address the ratio is 15; by residence it is 61. Punghina, Gogoșu and Jiana, also in Mehedinți, look the same: communes whose families have left altogether, but whose identity cards stayed behind.

School catchments

The town that gathers the neighbours’ children

Găești, a lowland town in Dâmbovița, registered 604 children born between 2015 and 2019 and has 903 pupils in primary school: 150 per 100. In the six communes it borders, the ratio runs from 52 to 71. If each of them kept its children at the national level, together they would have 264 more pupils; Găești has 389 more than the national level. The combined deficit of the ring of communes equals two thirds of the town’s surplus. The data track no individual pupil, but a blue commune pressed against a brown town is hard to read as anything but commuting.

The surplus is the number of pupils above the country’s 85 per 100; the neighbours’ deficit adds up, for the localities sharing a border, the pupils they lack to reach the same level. Click a name and the map moves there.

Beiuș, in Bihor, is the same mechanism in the mountains: 492 children born, 777 pupils, while Tărcaia, Curățele and Pocola all around have 49, 53 and 54 per 100. Târgoviște stands at 116 per 100, while Aninoasa, Ulmi and Șotânga, pressed against it, are under 50. For the big cities the ring of neighbours explains only part of the surplus: Cluj-Napoca has 4,151 pupils more than the national level, and the seven communes on its border, among them Chinteni at 42 and Baciu at 52, are short 1,048 pupils between them. Sibiu and Pitești stand at 119 per 100, Oradea at 111. The difference most probably comes from the whole county and from families who moved into the city after the child was born elsewhere.

Bucharest is the case turned inside out. The capital registered 109,604 children born between 2015 and 2019 and has 87,830 primary pupils: 80 per 100, below the national level. Ilfov, the county around it, has 97 per 100, and 15 of its localities pass 110: Berceni has 1,027 pupils for 346 children born, and Măgurele, Otopeni and Dragomirești-Vale are above 160. Ilfov’s surplus, nearly 3,000 pupils above the national level, covers more than half of Bucharest’s shortfall of roughly 5,500. Most probably these are families who gave birth in the city and raised the child in the new house on its edge; the data, though, cannot separate moving from commuting. Dumbrăvița, next to Timișoara, at 185 per 100, tells the same story.

At the scale of the whole country the two columns balance by construction, because the national level is their average: among the localities coloured on the map, those above the national level have 77,802 pupils more between them, and those below it 68,973 fewer. The map shows where pupils gather and where they are missing; why, it says only through its shape.

The extremes

The emptiest and the fullest

Line up the 2,883 localities coloured on the map by their ratio and most of them cluster just below the national level: 956 have between 78 and 91 pupils per 100 children born, and the median is 80. The lower tail is long: 400 localities lie between 45 and 64, and 92 are under 45. The upper tail is short and steep: 140 localities lie between 110 and 149, and 13 pass 150.

The lists below include only localities with at least 100 children born in the cohort window, so that they are not dominated by villages where one family with three children moves the figure by ten points. Click a name and the map moves there.

The bottom of the list holds two kinds of place. Târșolț and Bixad are communes in the Oaș Country, which has been sending people to Paris and its suburbs for decades; Gârla Mare and Țăndărei are localities whose families live abroad as whole households, with their identity cards left at home. Mănăstirea Humorului, Paleu, Moșoaia, Muntenii de Sus and Beclean are something else: communes attached to a town, Gura Humorului, Oradea, Pitești, Vaslui and Făgăraș, where the explanation to hand is the town school. The top of the list is almost entirely suburban: seven of the ten localities sit next to Bucharest or Timișoara. Two small towns with far more pupils than children born, Beiuș and Horezu, slip in among them, and Găești comes right after.

In lower secondary the hollow is deeper. Only one commune with at least 50 children born, Pietrari in Vâlcea, no longer reports any primary pupils; in lower secondary there are 13 such communes, among them Paleu in Bihor, Fizeșu Gherlii in Cluj and Turdaș in Hunedoara, each with more than 100 children born in their window. This is the usual pattern of reorganisation, though the data do not say where these pupils went: the small grades stay in the village, grades 5–8 gather at the commune centre or in the town next door.

The counties

Where the most are missing

A county cannot send its children to school in the next county in large numbers, so its ratio mostly gathers the effects of emigration and of births registered at abandoned addresses. Mehedinți, Ialomița, Galați and Hunedoara have between 74 and 77 pupils per 100 children born. At the other end, Ilfov, Vâlcea, Giurgiu, Harghita and Cluj have 95 or more. In 35 of the 41 counties, towns stand above communes; in Satu Mare, Dâmbovița and Argeș the difference exceeds 35 points.

^* Vaslui and Iași have a ratio that looks artificially low. The birth series of the city of Vaslui jumps from 700–800 a year before 2012 to 1,100–2,000 between 2013 and 2021 and then falls below 700, while the city’s pupil numbers stayed unchanged; the city of Iași has the same bulge, smaller. This is very probably an effect of how births were registered in those years. The two cities and the commune of Moșna, in Iași, whose series looks the same, are left out of the rankings, and their profiles carry a warning. Bucharest appears as a single locality.

Twenty years

The communes that fell

For comparison over time the right figure is the locality’s position relative to the country, because the cohort window changed in 2012 and the raw ratios before and after cannot be set side by side. Of the 2,664 localities that existed in 1992 and had at least 50 children born in both the 2005 and the 2025 windows, 140 stood below two thirds of the national level in 2005. In 2025 there are 211. Those that fell furthest are communes next to cities: Sacoșu Turcesc and Chevereșu Mare near Timișoara, Mândra and Beclean near Făgăraș; in Beclean the ratio dropped from 108 to 22 per 100, over a period in which the country went from 100 to 85. Those that rose furthest are the communes that became suburbs: Berceni, Dumbrăvița, Joița, Ciugud. Every locality’s profile shows its own line from 2000 to 2025 beside the country’s.

An essential caveat

What this page does not say

INS also counts the school units, classrooms, laboratories, gyms and sports grounds in each locality, and the profile shows them. But a school unit, in the INS definition, is an entity with legal personality and its own management, not a building. A commune may have three schools in three villages and a single unit; another may have children in classrooms but no unit seated there, because its school is a branch of a unit in the next commune.

The figures show this difference plainly. In the autumn of 2025, 3,168 localities report primary pupils, but only 2,850 have a primary-and-lower-secondary school unit seated in them. More than 300 localities therefore have classes without having a “school” in the statistical sense. For the same reason, the fall in the number of units, from 13,985 in 1995 to 3,806 in 2025, cannot be read as a count of schools closed: most of it is the reorganisation of 2003–2006, when the number fell from 12,456 to 5,045 because village schools were attached to one unit per commune. This page compares children with pupils, not buildings with buildings, and nowhere claims how many schools have closed.