School leak detection in Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland has no competitive non-household water market, so a school cannot switch retailer and every leakage question goes to NI Water directly.
The school estate in Northern Ireland
- Schools in Northern Ireland, 2025/26
- 764 primary, 190 post-primary
- Pupils enrolled, 2025/26
- 331,544
- Estate management structure
- Education Authority, CCMS and voluntary grammar sectors
- Water supplier
- NI Water
- Ground and water conditions
- Soft upland and lough-sourced water, high rainfall, and a high water table through the drumlin belt that keeps ground wet and disguises a surfacing leak.
- School building programmes
- An estate shaped by the controlled, maintained, integrated and voluntary grammar sectors, with substantial 1960s and 1970s building and a long-running new-build and major works programme.
Plus 93 nursery schools, 40 special schools and 15 independent schools.
Source: Department of Education, Northern Ireland, Schools and pupils in Northern Ireland, 1991/92 to 2025/26 (opens in a new tab) (). This figure is restated annually; check the current edition.
174,778 in primary schools and 156,766 in post-primary schools, with 7,729 in special schools.
Source: Department of Education, Northern Ireland, Schools and pupils in Northern Ireland, 1991/92 to 2025/26 (opens in a new tab) (). This figure is restated annually; check the current edition.
Northern Ireland has no academy trusts. Controlled schools sit with the Education Authority, Catholic maintained schools with the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools, and voluntary grammar and integrated schools manage their own estates.
Source: Department of Education, Northern Ireland, Schools and pupils in Northern Ireland, 1991/92 to 2025/26 (opens in a new tab) (). This figure is restated annually; check the current edition.
Northern Ireland has no competitive non-household water market. NI Water is the single supplier, so there is no retailer to switch to and no market leakage allowance scheme of the England and Wales kind. Ask NI Water directly what applies.
Source: Department of Education, Northern Ireland, Schools and pupils in Northern Ireland, 1991/92 to 2025/26 (opens in a new tab) (). This figure is restated annually; check the current edition.
Source: Department of Education, Northern Ireland, Schools and pupils in Northern Ireland, 1991/92 to 2025/26 (opens in a new tab) (). This figure is restated annually; check the current edition.
Source: Department of Education, Northern Ireland, Schools and pupils in Northern Ireland, 1991/92 to 2025/26 (opens in a new tab) (). This figure is restated annually; check the current edition.
The twelve regions arranged as a tile grid, shaded by open school count. Northern Ireland is outlined. Counts come from the four national school registers, not from an estimate.
What this means for a survey in Northern Ireland
The ground and water conditions above are the practical part. Hard water scales fittings and shortens the life of valves and mixers. Soft water is easier on scaling but less forgiving of some older metallic pipework. Shrinkable clay moves through a dry summer and pulls buried joints apart, and former coalfield ground settles differentially for decades after the workings closed.
None of that changes the sequence: measure at the meter, isolate to a branch, locate from the surface. It changes what we expect to find and where we look first.
Case studies from schools in Northern Ireland
None published yet. Rather than write a plausible-sounding example, this page says so. When ADI supplies a school in this region that is happy to be named, or happy to be described anonymously, it will appear here with the measured loss and what the repair involved.
Arranging a survey in Northern Ireland
Sources for this page
- Source: Department of Education, Northern Ireland, Schools and pupils in Northern Ireland, 1991/92 to 2025/26 (opens in a new tab) (). This figure is restated annually; check the current edition.
Last reviewed . How this site sources and dates its figures.