Lane Cove’s primary schools are shrinking. We ask why

In April 2026 In the Cove investigated whether there were fewer students at our local schools. There were.

This follow-up article looks at the numbers school by school, and at where the five-year-olds might have gone.

We have reviewed data for five schools:

• Lane Cove Public School (Lane Cove LGA)
• Lane Cove West Public School (Lane Cove LGA)
• Greenwich Public School (Lane Cove LGA)
• St Michael’s Catholic Primary School (Lane Cove LGA)
• Mowbray Public School (Willoughby LGA, but its catchment takes in part of the Lane Cove LGA)

Note: Chatswood Public School appears in our charts for comparison.

Our investigation found that every primary school within the Lane Cove LGA had fewer students in 2025 than in 2018: close to one in five fewer in total. The fall is sharpest in kindergarten.

The five schools took 395 children into kindergarten in 2025, the smallest intake in 17 years of published figures and 123 fewer than in 2018. Kindergarten has fallen in six of the last seven years.

Fewer babies are not the reason, at least not yet, and we found no sign of a rush to private schools nearby. More babies were registered to Lane Cove residents in 2018 to 2020, the birth years behind the last three kindergarten intakes, than in 2011 to 2015: about 565 a year, against about 470.

Two things are happening instead. More young children move out of the Lane Cove LGA than move in, which cancelled out the bigger birth years. And a smaller share of the children who live here start at these five schools, about 15% smaller than in 2016 to 2019.

No published data shows whether Lane Cove children are starting at schools elsewhere, or whether fewer children from outside the area are enrolling here.

The fall in births has not reached the classrooms yet. If the moving and enrolment patterns of the last few years continue, kindergarten at the five schools stays around 395 for the next two years, then falls to about 360 by 2029.

In this article: How each school has changed since 2018 | What happened to kindy? | What about 2026? | Is it just Lane Cove? | Is it fewer babies? Not yet. | The babies already born | Where is kindergarten heading? | Still to come | The missing column

How each school has changed since 2018

Five of the six schools in the chart are smaller than in 2018. The exception is Mowbray Public School, which has grown every year from 2016.

In December 2021 the Department of Education’s catchment map moved part of Chatswood Public’s catchment into Mowbray’s. None of those homes are in the Lane Cove LGA, so that change did not alter any Lane Cove family’s local school.

Taken together, the four schools inside the Lane Cove LGA (Lane Cove Public, Lane Cove West, Greenwich and St Michael’s) had 2,494 students in 2018 and 2,031 in 2025, close to one in five fewer. Enrolment figures for earlier years, for every school, are in our data spreadsheet.

What happened to kindy?

Across the four schools inside the Lane Cove LGA, kindergarten was 400 in 2018 and 286 in 2025, 29% lower. It was 308 in 2023 and 307 in 2024. One intake is a class list. Three in a row starts to look like a trend.

What about 2026?

Official 2026 figures have not been released. Each school’s 2026 total is due in December 2026 on My School, the website run by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA).

The NSW Department of Education told ITC its own 2026 enrolment figures will be available in February 2027, when the ABS publishes its annual schools data.

In the meantime, the schools’ own newsletters give an early look at 2026. Their figures are start-of-year counts, so they can be compared with each other but not with the August figures in our charts. By its own count, Lane Cove Public began 2026 with 672 students in 27 classes, down from 697 students in 28 classes at the same point in 2025.

Two other schools wrote to families about enrolments.

“We have commenced 2026 with 328 students enrolled, including 40 Kindergarten students,” Greenwich’s principal wrote to families on 6 February 2026, adding that “our enrolment numbers have decreased slightly from last year”.

Lane Cove West told families in its February 2026 newsletter that, because of its enrolment numbers, it would no longer have a deputy principal.

Sydney Catholic Schools, which oversees St Michael’s, told ITC it “does not disclose enrolment figures for individual schools”, and that the school “continues to experience strong enrolment demand and remains a popular choice for local families”.

Is it just Lane Cove?

No. All 13 public primaries outside the Lane Cove LGA that we tracked in April (Mowbray was not among them) are below their peak. Between them they had 441 fewer students in 2025 than in 2024.

Statewide, NSW government primary enrolments peaked in 2019 at 495,738 and were 459,957 in 2025, according to the ABS.

Across the six council areas ITC examined  (Lane Cove, Willoughby, Hunters Hill, North Sydney, Mosman and Ryde), kindergarten intake fell between 2018 and 2025 in every one.

Is it fewer babies? Not yet.

The obvious explanation for a smaller kindergarten is that fewer babies were born five years earlier. For the children who started kindergarten in 2023, 2024 and 2025, that does not fit.

They were born around 2018, 2019 and 2020, when 598, 564 and 533 births were registered to Lane Cove residents. The children who started kindergarten in 2016 to 2020 came from years with fewer births, between 433 and 516. That holds even allowing for registration timing.

Three Possible Explanations

So why is kindergarten smaller? We tested three possible explanations.

The first is that families are choosing Catholic and independent schools, which a reader suggested after our first article. Within the six council areas we checked, the numbers do not support it.

In the Lane Cove LGA, St Michael’s (Catholic) and Currambena (the only independent school in the LGA with a kindergarten) each took fewer kindergarten children in 2025 than in 2016.

Across all six councils over the same years, Catholic and independent kindergarten held steady, while government kindergarten fell from 3,005 to 2,305.

Reddam House North Shore, an independent school in North Sydney, opened for kindergarten to Year 10 at the start of 2025, and ACARA has no figures for it. It cannot explain most of the drop, which had started before it opened: government kindergarten across the six council areas was already down to 2,428 in 2024.

The 2021 Census counted the primary school students living in Lane Cove by the type of school they attend. About two in three were at government schools, a higher share than in 2011. A move to private schools further away since then would not show up until the 2026 Census results are published.

The second is moving house. Follow the same children over time: Lane Cove’s under-fives in one year become its five-to-nine-year-olds five years later. Between 2017 and 2020 that group grew as it aged, because more young children moved in than out.

In each of the last four years it has shrunk instead, by about one child in ten. Across Greater Sydney the same group held about level (ABS population estimates). So although Lane Cove had more babies, the number of five-to-nine-year-olds living here has stayed about the same.

The third is that fewer of the children who live here start at these five schools. The number of children aged five to nine living in Lane Cove is about where it was: 2,400 a year from 2016 to 2019 and 2,370 from 2023 to 2025. Kindergarten at the five schools fell much further, from 494 a year to 413. The area-by-area figures are in our spreadsheet.

Put the two together. For every 1,000 children aged five to nine living here, the five schools (Mowbray included) took 206 into kindergarten each year from 2016 to 2019, and 174 from 2023 to 2025, a fall of 15%. The chart compares that with nearby councils and Greater Sydney.

The drop is recent. Measured this way, each of the last four intakes was lower than any year from 2016 to 2021.

The published data cannot tell us which of two things is happening: Lane Cove children are starting at other schools, or fewer children from outside the area are enrolling here.

One policy might explain why fewer children from outside the area enrol here. From 2019 the NSW Department of Education set enrolment caps for public schools, and a school at or above its cap could take children from outside its catchment only in exceptional circumstances.

In 2019 all three public primaries in the LGA had more students than the caps set for 2020. But the caps do not line up with the falls: Lane Cove Public, below its cap every year since 2020, and Greenwich, whose cap was raised in 2021, each lost more kindergarten children a year than Lane Cove West, which was still over its cap in 2021. The detail is in our spreadsheet.

So fewer births do not explain the drop in kindergarten so far. The births data suggests that is still to come.

The babies already born

Children in NSW can start kindergarten in the year they turn five by 31 July, and must be at school by their sixth birthday. So every child who will start kindergarten in the next five years has already been born.

The ABS estimates that the number of children under five living here fell from a high of 2,653 in 2019 to 2,348 in 2025.

Births registered to Lane Cove residents have fallen every year since 2021. Those children are not yet old enough for school: a child born in 2024 starts kindergarten in 2029 or 2030.

Fertility rates point the same way. Lane Cove's, a three-year average of births per woman, fell from 1.65 in 2018 to 1.47 in 2023 (1.33 in 2024, a figure understated by registration timing), and every one of the six council areas is lower than in 2018.

Where is kindergarten heading?

Our projection takes the children already born and assumes two things stay as they are today:

• about 90 children aged five to nine live here for every 100 under-fives five years earlier, because more young children move out than in
• the five schools take 174 kindergarten children for every 1,000 of those five-to-nine-year-olds

On those assumptions, kindergarten at the five schools stays at about 395 in 2026 and 2027, then falls to about 360 by 2029. This is our arithmetic, not a forecast: the same calculation done in 2020 would have overestimated every kindergarten intake since.

The NSW Government's 2024 population projection expected 2,855 under-fives in Lane Cove in 2025, 507 more than the ABS estimate of 2,348, and more than 3,100 by 2029.

The Government has since shelved a planned 1,000-place primary school on the former Metro dive site at Chatswood, and a St Leonards Education Precinct, saying "there's not an urgent need right now," as we reported in April.

Still to come

Three dates to watch:

• ABS Births 2025 on Friday 6 November 2026 gives a 2025 figure for Lane Cove, and will update the 2029 end of our projection.
• The 2026 My School profiles, with each school's official 2026 total, are due in December 2026.
• The 2026 Census first release, due in June 2027, will revise the population estimates used here.

Every figure in this article, with the detail behind it and the windows we used for each ratio, is in our data spreadsheet.

The missing column

Our figures count children in two separate ways: by the school they attend, and by the LGA they live in. No published data links the two, so we cannot tell which school each Lane Cove child starts at, let alone why their family chose it.

That is the column we cannot fill from a desk. Parents, grandparents, teachers and anyone who moved house with a five-year-old can.

If a child you know started kindergarten in the last few years, here or anywhere else, tell us which school and what decided it. A catchment line, a move, a later start, a school over the council boundary: one sentence is plenty. Please do not name teachers or staff.

Comment on our Facebook or Instagram posts, or email [email protected].

Somebody filled in an enrolment form for every child who started kindergarten. We would like to hear from them.

This article was written by Anthony El-Khoury as an unpaid contributor. Data collection, analysis, and visualisations were completed with the assistance of AI, with all claims checked against the cited sources. The views expressed are his own and not those of his employer.

Sources:

• ACARA Data Access Program: Enrolments by Grade 2008-2025 and School Locations 2025
• ACARA key dates (My School release)
• NSW Department of Education: NSW government school enrolments by head count, 2004-2025
• ABS Schools 2025, Table 42b: full-time and part-time students, 2006-2025
• ABS Births, Australia 2024: births and fertility by local government area (33010DC03)
• ABS Regional population by age and sex 2025 (32350DS0006)
• NSW Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure: 2024 population projections
• ABS: 2026 Census topics and data release
• In the Cove, April 2026: Lane Cove Schools, Part 1
• NSW Department of Education: starting school
• School newsletters, Term 1 2026: Lane Cove Public (and Term 1 2025), Greenwich Public, Lane Cove West Public