115 children killed or seriously injured on NI roads in 2025
PureCar original analysis | 23 October 2026. The recorded total for under-16s rose from 93 to 115 in one year. What the figures establish and what remains unknown. This report separates recorded evidence from analysis, so readers can understand not only the headline but also the limits of the data.
The increase in one year
The PSNI’s 2025 statistics record 115 children under 16 killed or seriously injured, compared with 93 in 2024. That is 22 more children and a rise of approximately 24%. The term killed or seriously injured, often shortened to KSI, combines two distinct outcomes. The published summary figure does not mean that 115 children died, and presenting it that way would seriously misrepresent the evidence.
Why the figure deserves separate attention
Children experience the road network as pedestrians, vehicle passengers, cyclists and other road users. Their journeys may cluster around school opening and closing times, crossings and residential streets. That does not demonstrate that school gates caused the recorded increase. It does show why child road safety should be analysed by road-user type, injury severity, age and location rather than buried inside the total 7,879 casualties.
What better local reporting requires
A meaningful school-route investigation should examine recorded collision locations, crossing facilities, traffic speeds where measured and changes to local street layouts. It should also distinguish a collision outside a school from one involving a child travelling to school. National figures are not a substitute for that local evidence. They justify asking councils, the Department for Infrastructure and road safety partners for better transparency about interventions and results.
How to interpret next year’s number
A lower or higher number in 2026 will be important, but no single year should settle the issue. Small population groups can show substantial percentage changes even when absolute changes are modest. Tracking several years and separating fatal and serious injury outcomes will provide a stronger test. The immediate conclusion from the verified 2025 data is narrower and still important: more children experienced the most severe recorded road-collision outcomes.
Why the baseline matters more than a single percentage
The 115 children aged under 16 killed or seriously injured in 2025 compares with 93 in 2024: 22 additional child KSI casualties, an increase of around 23.7%. The Department for Infrastructure also gives a strategy baseline of 71, making the 2025 figure approximately 62.0% above baseline. The baseline uses an earlier multi-year reference period and is not the total for 2024.
Child casualty totals include different road-user situations and cannot automatically be labelled school-gate incidents. Before assigning a cause, local authorities would need breakdowns by age, travel mode, journey time, road class, crossing provision and injury severity. Any assessment of a specific school or junction should include observed movements and vehicle speeds, not only the number of reported collisions.
Parents and carers can use one robust precaution now: choose routes where crossing locations and sightlines are clear, and do not treat apparently quiet side roads as automatically safer. PureCar has not identified particular schools as collision hotspots from this annual count.
About the evidence
This PureCar analysis uses officially published PSNI and Northern Ireland departmental statistics. The police series covers injury road traffic collisions reported to police; it does not capture every non-injury bump, near miss or unreported incident. A collision is an event and a casualty is a person, so the two totals must not be used interchangeably. The figures are historical and do not indicate conditions on any route right now.
What the figures cannot prove
A higher count in a place or group does not, by itself, establish greater risk per vehicle journey, per mile travelled or per person. The appropriate denominator and road-user exposure data would be required for that conclusion. Nor can the published summary alone establish responsibility for individual incidents. Where this article raises questions about infrastructure, enforcement or road-user behaviour, those are reporting questions unless a cited source confirms an answer.
Explore the underlying information
For local road context, see PureCar’s Northern Ireland road safety reports. For present-day road disruption, use PureCar traffic information. The PSNI road collision statistics library contains the official statistical series and supporting files. Figures can be revised by data owners; for definitive tables and definitions readers should check the official publications directly.
