Cardiff Students Seek Solutions to Llandovery’s Deepening Plight

Update January 30th 2016

A glint of positive news — the idea to move Ysgol Rhys Prichard primary school to the vacated Ysgol Gyfun Pantycelyn comprehensive school is supported in principle by Carmarthenshire County Council’s chief executive, Mark James, reports The Post in the February 2016 issue (p.23). Handel Davies, chair of the campaign group ‘Future of Pantycelyn’, has wide backing for the proposal, including from Llandovery Town Council, and the headteacher and governors of Ysgol Rhys Prichard.

The plan includes selling the Rhys Prichard site –ideally for an employment-creating purpose —  and using the proceeds to adapt the Pantycelyn premises for younger pupils.

Pantycelyn has all sorts of features often lacking from primary schools — big hall, sports field, specialist classrooms and laboratories, gymnasium, swimming pool adjacent — which could help to bring back young families to the town.

 

The current primary school building, Ysgol Rhys Prichard, would be sold

How many primary schools would have a hall this size? 

Original post

Llandovery’s decline, and how to reverse it, is a case study for architecture students from Cardiff University, who were in the town yesterday (Thursday) to present their initial, individual ideas. The separation of the castle from the town was a repeat theme, requiring improvement with the help of a little demolition or even major redevelopment, as in one plan which imagines retail relocations into what is now the car park, bowling green and tennis courts. Or how about garden sharing — a scheme for elderly folk to offer gardens for others to cultivate, and share the produce, as part of a scheme to make Llandovery an exemplar of sustainable living.

Ideas for Llandovery: Cardiff students’ proposals on show in the Castle Hotel

Mock historic façades, to make the town more spectacular and memorable during the annual Sheep Festival, are featured in one zany, imaginative plan. Making much more of a feature of the Welsh language; holding more matches on the Llandovery College rugby pitch and building stands there with a total of 500 seats; linking Garden Lane to Broad Street with two pedestrian pathways; and creating an arts centre are also among the suggestions.

As the students depart to develop their projects,  the Llandovery they leave behind is really suffering.

The students will be back with their finished proposals: here’s hoping that funds will be available to implement those schemes which impress  local people as likely restorers of vitality and sparkle.

Saying it all — closure notice in a window of the building which used to be HSBC Bank, Market Square 

 

Ex-HSBC building, empty, and next to it, The Bear pub, closed 

The central building is the former NatWest Bank, now closed, in Market Square

Decline and fall: Carmarthenshire County Council’s decision to close the comprehensive school, Ysgol Gyfun Pantycelyn, has multiplied the town’s problems 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Empty shop in Stone Street. Right, on the other side of Water Street, the empty building which used to be Costcutters convenience store

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

King Richard III granted Llandovery’s charter. Five hundred and thirty one years later, the town needs another such accolade to raise its profile  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Broken-down ASDA van rescued by a UTS lorry — which also broke down and was parked outside Ysgol Gyfun Pantycelyn, waiting for a tow. Up a creek without a paddle, just like the town

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Empty spaces in Llandovery’s car park, in the middle of a weekday 

 

 

The swimming pool, owned by Carmarthenshire County Council and on the site of about-to-close Ysgol Gyfun Pantycelyn, loses over £100,000 a year. How secure is its future?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pembrokeshire Mistake Gives Public More Time to Campaign Against Schools Change

Council forgot it does not own school 

Inept administration in Pembrokeshire might in the end result in parents and students getting what they want – a choice of post-16 education in Haverfordwest.

The county council forgot it did not own Tasker Milward, a Church in Wales Voluntary Controlled comprehensive school it wanted to close, and forgot to discuss its proposals with the owners, the Tasker Milward and Picton Charity, thereby wasting two years of council planning and giving parents and students new hope that their wishes will not be overruled.

Cllr Jacob Williams (Ind, East Williamston), on his highly readable blog, tracks two years of deliberations over complex, linked proposals which in the most recent incarnation were to

• Close Tasker Milward and Sir Thomas Picton comprehensive schools in Haverfordwest
• Close Ysgol Glan Cleddau primary school in Haverfordwest
• Open a 3-16 Welsh-medium school on the Tasker Milward site
• Provide for 16+ Welsh-medium education at Ysgol y Preseli, 24 miles distant
• Open an English-medium 11-16 school on the Sir Thomas Picton site
• Move all 16+ English-medium education to the Pembrokeshire College campus in Haverfordwest

Parents and pupils have strongly opposed the plan to axe 16+ education in the schools, and Cllr Williams pointed out at yesterday’s council meeting that although the option to attend Pembrokeshire College at 16 already exists, the majority of young people choose to remain at school.

Maurice Hughes, chair of the trustees of the Tasker Milward and Picton Charity, had written to the county council stating that the trustees cannot agree to the use of the charity’s assets for the fulfilment of the local authority’s statutory obligations, or for the benefit of people outside Haverfordwest (which the reorganisation plan would involve). The charity’s remit is for education solely within Haverfordwest, he pointed out.

The negotiations which the charity trustees are insisting upon mean that the whole proposal is back to square one, no further forward  than in November 2013 – although an indirect part of the same plan, creating more post-16 places at Pembrokeshire College’s Pembroke campus, a dozen miles from Haverfordwest, is already under way! The extra places would be needed so  that more students could be diverted there from the college’s Haverfordwest site, to make room for the post-16s who would have no option but to attend, if the successor schools to Tasker Milward and Sir Thomas Picton catered only for pupils aged 11-16.

Protest led to change for St Davids

Families in Haverfordwest became even more annoyed about their impending loss of choice when proposals for a similar ‘rationalisation’ in and around St Davids were amended following intervention by Cllr David Lloyd (Ind, St Davids), to allow both the comprehensives scheduled for closure, Ysgol Dewi Sant, St Davids, and Ysgol Bro Gwaun, Fishguard, to remain open for pupils aged 11-16.  The county council also intended to close Solva primary school, but a determined campaign by parents led to a rethink, and the current plan is to maintain Solva’s school as a campus of a new Church in Wales Voluntary Aided school for pupils aged 3-16, also encompassing the Dewi Sant and Bro Gwaun campuses.

Now, the restarting of consultations over school reorganisation in Haverfordwest gives that community longer to ratchet up their opposition and to persuade the county council to rethink.

Complicated cost-benefit sums

All the planned changes are, of course, responses to cost pressures whereby it seems cheaper to centralise education on a very few sites, and force pupils to travel. Even if you were looking just at the economics, they are not straightforward. A new school can be substantially more energy-efficient than a 1960s quick-build, for example, but you have to do calculations to work out if the premises savings are outweighed by the transport costs – and what about climate-changing emissions from the transport, let alone the waste of time for pupils?

At least in Pembrokeshire, when county councillors make a fuss on behalf of the communities they represent, changes of plan are possible.  Next door in Carmarthenshire, a huge effort by the people in and around Llandovery to keep open their comprehensive, Ysgol Gyfun Pantycelyn, was met only with a refusal to listen to them, and a determination to stick to the original plan, come what may.

PDR

Petition to Press Government to Save Education in Rural Wales

So what happens if every rural school closes? Most of Wales would become a child-free zone inhabited by pensioners. Rural Wales is already damaged by the withdrawal of public services,  which will continue to disappear unless the Welsh Government can be persuaded to intervene. That’s the purpose of this petition for a different financial settlement for rural areas. At the time of writing, the petition has 734 signatures. It needs more!

e-Petition: The Additional Pressures on Funding for Education Provision Faced by Sparsely Populated Rural Areas

We, the undersigned, call upon the Welsh Government to recognize the financial challenges of providing an appropriate level of educational provision in sparsely populated rural areas. Spending cuts are adversely affecting school communities to the extent that children are leaving their county of residence (and increasingly, in border counties, such as Powys, leaving Wales) in order to continue their education. Schools and sixth forms are at breaking point, exhausted by continual threat of closure. Our children are forced to travel unsustainable distances on minor roads, breaking up friendship groups and adding up to two hours to the school day. Nursery education is now also under threat, and with continuous cuts to school budgets causing round after round of redundancies, it is impossible to deliver the quality of education that teachers trained for and that our young people deserve. We urge the Welsh Government to immediately investigate the additional challenges to education in sparsely populated rural areas, and to increase the funding to areas such as Powys accordingly. The loss of our schools heralds the death of our communities and our local economies. If a devolved Wales is to thrive, we need our Government to lead the funding discussions in Westminster. We need you on our side!

Where Have All the Children Gone?

News that the Llandovery campus of Ysgol Bro Dinefwr comprehensive school, formerly Ysgol Gyfun Pantycelyn, will close in February 2016, prompts me to wander round the empty schools of rural Carmarthenshire.

The area has lost its children, a loss reflected in vacant school buildings.

In Llansawel in the Cothi Valley, the Mudiad Methrin nursery group has to vacate the empty school by the end of the summer term. The methrin group is now wondering how and where to relocate.

The tidy part of Ysgol Llansawel used by the soon-to-be-evicted meithrin group

The main school building shows many signs of maintenance neglect, symptomatic of its marginal status during recent years.

Llansawel school: unloved in recent years

Llansawel was, until 2011-12, to be the location of a new Dyffryn Cothi (Cothi Valley) school, but the plan was dropped in that year, as quietly as possible, because the education authority — Carmarthenshire County Council — reported “…recent events and a regular analysis of the situation means that the Authority has no choice but to revisit the options appraisal and proposed solution. It is very unlikely that the existing proposal in the Dyffryn Cothi area would stand up to the challenge and rigorous (sic) of the HM Treasury 5 Case Business Model, to attract the grant funding as required for all 21CS Band A projects. Regrettably the project is no longer educationally or financially viable”. (Modernising Education Programme Annual Report 2011-12, section 3 paragraph 3.9.) More of this later.

Caio School, about five miles to the east, closed its doors in September 2012.

Caio School was once at the heart of the village

The community has converted Crugybar School into a modern village hall

Crugybar School, between Llansawel and Caio, was transferred to the community and is now serving a useful purpose as a village hall.

East of Caio, Cilycwm School has the sad aspect of a redundant building, asking “Where have all the children gone?” Cilycwm is, like Crugybar, Caio and Llansawel, a village without a shop or Post Office or anything much in the way of work opportunities.

Cilycwm School north of Llandovery: no children

 The fate of village schools is one consequence of draconian planning restrictions in the ‘countryside’, which viewed through an urban prism is a memory of times past, of landscapes past, which are protected from change. Viewing the countryside as part of history rather than as integral to economic resilience means that public services like schools fall foul of the Treasury Five Case Model, which requires projects to be assessed against five sets of criteria — strategic, economic, commercial, financial and management. When little value is placed on the strategic, economic or financial worth of rural communities, protecting their schools is relegated to a trivial consideration.

The Welsh Government requires all projects under its 21st Century Schools (21CS) programme to pass the Five Case Model assessments. In fact Carmarthenshire did include its plans for a new Dyffryn Cothi school at Llansawel in the first wave — the Band A — of 21st Century Schools. It was project no.1 in a list of 12 with an estimated total cost of £86.7 million. But in a competition against the Five Case Model, the school was bound to lose.

The first criterion in the Five Case Model is ‘strategic’, and until this is recast to include the countryside as a source of resilience to future shocks, from which food and energy will have to come, public services will continue to fade away. Planning restrictions would have to be eased, too, so that homes within the financial reach of young people, and workplaces for businesses, can be sited in the villages and small towns which have become so sought-after by nostalgic pensioners.  Either we make planning policies more flexible, or we have a countryside resembling an open-air retirement home, the children all long moved away.

PDR

Dying School, Pernickety Bank and Busy Bees

Llansawel School

Oh dear. One of the last rural schools in Carmarthenshire, Llansawel, is on notice of closure. The county council has a well practised method of closing schools. Hint that closure is possible, and hope that parents will stop choosing the school. Say that closure is intended, and tell parents that if they take their children away voluntarily, the authority will pay for transport, but also convey the probability that if parents oppose closure, they will be on their own.

This posture seems dubious, because the education authority has a duty to transport primary-age children if they live more than two miles from the nearest school, and in the case of Llansawel you could multiply that distance by five before reaching a school with an apparently secure future.

There is no obligation to bus under-fives to school, so when one closes, if their parents or carers do not have a car their disposal, or money to run it, rural under-fives are denied a choice that is offered to town children.

And what about speeding lorries? With the UK government increasing maximum lorry speeds on single carriageway roads to 50mph, and more school buses and taxis also running on the less-and less-well maintained roads, how safe will those bus journeys be?

For years now, the education authority in Carmarthenshire has promoted big central schools, without assessing – publicly at least – whether the additional transport costs are sustainable, whether multi-site schools might be a better option socially and environmentally, whether the convenience to the education authority is outweighed by the damage to communities which lose their school. It seems policy to close schools by neglect, so that in the end councillors can shake their heads, wring their hands and declare that the school closed itself.

 

Banks and voluntary organisations

Do banks enjoy pressurising voluntary organisations? This year I took over as the treasurer of two organisations, Transition Tywi Trawsnewid and Llansawel Village Hall. In the first case, this involves a change of signatory and change of name, from Transition Town Llandeilo. In the second case, it’s just a change of signatory.

Transition Tywi banks with the Co-operative, selected a few years back as the ethical choice. That seems a bit odd, after the antics of former chairman the Reverend Paul Flowers, and the near collapse of the bank, now controlled by hedge funds and with the Co-operative Group just as a minority shareholder. In fact dealing with the Co-op Bank has been fairly straightforward, provided you remember to send the ancillary documents like signed minutes and the constitution.

HSBC, bankers for the village hall, are much more pernickety, and the change-over process has been going on for months. Proofs of identity: no online printouts allowed. OK, my passport was accepted, but as most of my accounts are online, I did not have much other choice, and those I took along to the branch first time were rejected because they did not include my middle names, or ran names together without spaces. Eventually I found a document they were willing to accept, and thought all was in order when the counter clerk admitted “Yes, everything looks fine now”. A week later, a telephone call. “We are sorry, but we have changed the mandate forms, so you need to do it again…….”

 

In the garden

I let some carrots flower, and they have been attracting beneficial insects such as bees and hoverflies. Reckon I’ll do the same next year. Good year for runner beans, courgettes, cucumbers, but the onion crop was rather light. More compost required. Never enough compost.

The minute I decided to do some weeding, we had a downpour – after more than a week without any rain.

Pat Dodd Racher

The Wheels on the Bus Go £££

by Pat Dodd Racher

Photo from Wiki-JET

Extra travel-to-school costs resulting from the closure of Ysgol Gyfun Pantycelyn, Llandovery, will be £460,000 a year, according to calculations made by Carmarthenshire County Council and released this week under the Freedom of Information Act.

If the calculation is correct, the costs of transporting pupils to the new Ysgol Bro Dinefwr 13 miles away in Ffairfach will be almost £2.2 million a year, compared with £1.73 million for transport to Pantycelyn and Tregib in Ffairfach, the two schools that are to be replaced.

Transport for pupils currently attending Pantycelyn has to be re-organised, and new routes created, to keep the theoretical maximum journey time to one hour each way.

Pupils will also lose the opportunity to do something more productive than sitting on a bus, but this enforced reduction in work or leisure time was not considered when the journey time analyses were made. A conventional way to value this time is to allocate a monetary value to it, but Carmarthenshire states that “No monetary value was attributed to pupils’ travelling time as part of this exercise”.

In ‘A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Rural Secondary School Consolidation: a Report to Gwynedd County Council’, James Foreman-Peck of the Welsh Institute for Research and Development, Cardiff Business School, followed Department of Transport guidelines for costing travel and gave a value to pupils’ extra travelling time. His figure was £5 an hour, based on the Department of Transport’s value of £4.46 per hour for ‘leisure travel’ in 2002, uprated for inflation. The current value, using the Retail Prices Index, would be £6.32 an hour.

If Carmarthenshire County Council had put a value on pupils’ wasted time, the outcome of the journey cost exercise would have been very different. Let’s suggest that the increase in daily travelling time averages 20 minutes twice a day. This was the figure used for Gwynedd, and is probably conservative in the case of Pantycelyn, where all the pupils who currently walk to school will face an additional 30 minutes or so each way, on a straightforward non-stop journey. Even at an extra 20 minutes each way, and limiting the number of pupils to 300 – there were 313 on roll when Estyn inspected the school in March 2011 – the cost is huge. Taking a school year as 188 days, each pupil’s additional wasted time is just over 125 hours a year. At £6.32 an hour, that is £790. Multiply by 300, and the result is £237,000 in lost time.

Anyone spending two hours a day on a bus for 188 days would waste 376 hours, equivalent to almost 63 six-hour school days – one third of the time they actually spend learning in school.

Adding just the conservatively-estimated additional cost of wasted time on the longer journey to Ffairfach to the £460,000 extra transport costs that the council has calculated, and the total soars to £697,000 a year in costs that would not be incurred if a secondary school campus were to be retained in Llandovery.

Many would say that children’s travel time does not have a cost, but pupils may not be able to do a part-time job, practice a skill such as piano, violin or guitar, look after pets, or even do homework. Time spent on a school bus is not ‘productive time’.

When all costs, incurred and imputed, are taken into account, school closures are much harder to justify. I hope that Ysgol Bro Dinefwr will be a great success, that no pupils will be on the road for more than two hours a day, that they will prefer it to their previous schools, but longer journeys to school, and the consequent higher emissions of noxious gases, are not exactly helpful in the battle against rapid climate change. Assuming an average extra distance per journey of 8 miles, that makes 16 miles a day for 188 days, 3,112 extra miles per pupil per year. Multiplying that by 300 pupils gives 933,600 person-miles, enough to go round the world 37.5 times!

Climate change and pollution issues are not going away. The USA’s move to fracked shale gas has freed up US coal for export, and some of it is being burned in UK power stations. Coal powered 40% of the UK’s electricity generation in 2012, the highest level since 1996, the Environment Agency revealed on November 11^th. The increase in coal burning resulted in a 19% rise in damaging sulphur emissions, which return earthwards in ‘acid rain’. Therefore, even if the availability of fracked gas means that fuel price rises are lower than anticipated in the short run, the dangerous downsides are more air pollution and environmental damage.

Extra travel is of course only one aspect of the calculations underlying school reorganisation, but it does appear that in the case of Pantycelyn, the issue of children’s lost time was not given deep consideration. In addition, the pollution implications of longer road journeys, year after year into the future, were not prioritised. And just considering the money cost alone, the wheels on the bus truly go £££.

The issues go far beyond the county council, which was operating within the legal framework at the time. They are matters for national government, and urgent matters at that.

The author is grateful to Carmarthenshire County Council for the information released under the FOI Act.

200 Square Miles Without State Secondary Education?

Why closing Ysgol Gyfun Pantycelyn, Llandovery, is not the best option for future prosperity

The catchment area of the doomed Ysgol Gyfun Pantycelyn – the wards of Llandovery, Cilycwm, Llangadog and the eastern half of Cynwyl Gaeo – contained 522 children aged 7 to 13 in 2011. These would be the secondary school population of 2015. This number excludes the new population to result from planned housing estates in Llandovery, but does include children whose parents opted to avoid Pantycelyn because of the closure rumours that began back in 2008.

To reach Carmarthenshire County Council’s proposed new school west of Ffairfach, pupils have to be transported through Llandeilo, where air pollution levels are too high and must be cut. Less road traffic, not more, is the answer.

The alternative route on the south side of the river Tywi through Bethlehem is narrow, winding, and single lane in places – not at all suitable for buses, which would present dangers to other road users.

A bypass for Llandeilo is suggested as the ‘get out of jail’ card. No money has been allocated for this, and given the heavy pressures on the Welsh Government’s budget, money may not be forthcoming. In addition, do we really want to destroy the historic landscape of the Tywi valley at Llandeilo with urban intrusions of roads and roundabouts, as well as with buildings for a 1200-pupil school?

Transporting hundreds of children twice a day from their own community, over distances of as much as 20 miles, is damaging in many ways – bus and car emissions adding to pollution, unnecessary and costly consumption of diesel and petrol, time wasted sitting on buses.

There are no state secondary schools near Llandovery to which children could easily transfer. Brecon High School and Ysgol Bro Pedr, Lampeter, are each 21 miles away. Builth Wells High School is 25 miles. Yes, there is the independent Llandovery College, but the fees are too high for the majority of local households to contemplate.

The long-term costs of closing the school are likely to be far greater than any short-term savings in cost per pupil – savings that, in any case, will evaporate as fuel costs rise. Secondary school education is a critical necessity without which towns decline. This autumn the secondary schools in Llandovery and Llandeilo have been combined into Ysgol Bro Dinefwr, which could surely continue as a TWO SITE SCHOOL? Far better than creating a zone of 200 square miles with no state secondary education at all.

Educational dead zone of 200 square miles

The Erasure of Rural Wales Edges Closer

Llansawel Show, September 14 2013: the sheep classes are the focus of deep discussions throughout the day.

by Pat Dodd Racher

Llansawel Show was yesterday. Sheep, poultry, ponies, giant vegetables, odd vegetables, flowers, jams, cookery, arts and crafts.  Lots of entries from children at Llansawel School. Burgers (local), beer (from local pub), ice cream (local). The weather was kind, all in all a very pleasant afternoon. Most people, certainly most older people, were chatting and conducting the business of the day in Welsh.

One field to the east is Llansawel School. The word around the village is that the school will close in 2016, and under-11s will be bussed to Cwmann on the outskirts of Lampeter, between 12 and 13 miles from Llansawel village along twisty roads. The AA calculates that the journey is just on half an hour, without any stops. Add in the numerous stops made by school buses…. You get the picture.

True, Llansawel School received an indifferent inspection report from Estyn this summer. The less-than-complimentary word “adequate” is scattered through the report like faded confetti. There were 15 full-time and five part-time pupils in May, in a school that can accommodate 60, and the cost for each was £9,297. Only two primary schools in the county had a higher cost per pupil, said Estyn’s report.

Llansawel village, the surrounding farms, the heart of the Welsh countryside – you would expect several pupils to come from Welsh speaking families, would you not? I was staggered to read that only 5% of pupils speak Welsh at home. Five per cent of 20 is exactly ONE. One pupil, in a rural Carmarthenshire Welsh-medium school, whose family speak Welsh. Many more than this, 40%, have additional learning needs and 35% are entitled to free school meals, the latter statistic indicating serious disadvantage. Another salient factor is, in Estyn’s words, “since 2010 a high percentage of latecomers have joined the school, particularly in Key Stage 2 (ages 7-11)”. This context suggests to me that the term “adequate” stems more from declines in community cohesiveness, linguistic capability and economic prosperity in the catchment area, than from any lack of educational ambition within the school.

Competitive growing: village veg at Llansawel Show.

What do we have here? A supposedly Welsh-medium primary school where children have to learn Welsh as an additional language and who do not use the language outside school. Children coming and going as their families move from one short-term rented home to another. There are empty houses in Llansawel, into which newcomers move for a time, but there is no work for incomers and no public transport for commuting.

Current policy is to close schools down as numbers dwindle. Kevin Madge (Labour), the leader of Carmarthenshire County Council, is quoted thus in last week’s (September 11) Carmarthen Journal, referring to the impending closure of Llanfynydd Primary School, further down the Cothi valley: “Again on this occasion these schools are closing themselves…… We cannot sustain a school with 10 or 11 pupils” (my emphasis).

I have never seen a school close itself. People open and close schools, Mr Madge. Closing rural schools as an automatic reaction to falling rolls reflects an absence of rural policy when we have never been in greater need of revitalising our country districts.

State secondary education is being withdrawn from Llandovery, 12 miles to the east of Llansawel, enforcing long and tiring daily journeys on children as young as 11. Most of the village primary schools have already gone. There is a vicious cycle of decline, the domino effect of services disappearing, the jobs they offered vanishing, and people of working age departing, if they can. There are few children on farms, because nearly two in every three farmers in Wales are aged 55 and over and thus mainly in the grandparent generation, according to the BBC. In any case, there is often insufficient income for multi-generational farms.

That will change as we crash into the global limits of food, water and fuel supply. Then our countryside will be appreciated for the precious resource it is, local food production will race up the political agenda, and the amenities that have been destroyed will have to be recreated. Wouldn’t it be more constructive, over the long term, to protect the few remaining rural schools and in that way to slow the closure of pubs, post offices, shops and other communal meeting places? Otherwise the thread of tradition will be broken, local knowledge and language will wither away, and the impact of that loss could be far more serious than the powers-that-be yet realise.

Back in Llansawel, without the involvement of children in the school, Llansawel Show itself would have fewer entries and fewer visitors. It could, in time, become yet another falling domino.

What fate awaits Ysgol Gynradd Llansawel, an under-occupied Welsh-medium primary where scarcely any children speak Welsh at home? Villagers anticipate closure in 2016.

Leighton Andrews Proves the Point: Time to Seek Creative Options to School Closures

by Pat Dodd Racher 

My assumption that the Welsh Government’s ex-education minister Leighton Andrews (Labour, Rhondda) really believed in his policy to close under-occupied schools appears to have been mistaken. The photos of Mr Andrews holding a placard reading ‘Save Pentre Primary and The Community’ reveal that he is well aware of the damage to any community when its school closes.

Mr Andrews has resigned. Unlike Janus, he did not have the power to face different directions at the same time and ignore the consequences. It was his policy to close schools, in a bid to cut the numbers of spare places, but it was also a policy that, evidently, he felt he could not support in his own constituency, because of the ensuing damage to the community. He would also have risked a blow to his own chances of being re-elected to represent the Labour Party.

This prompts the question, are there alternatives to completely shutting schools?

What about creative site sharing, such as leasing part of school premises to small businesses, for example, or to voluntary organisations? At the same time, small schools could be linked, more cost-effectively, in multi-campus federations. There must be less drastic approaches to the problem than the fatal wielding of an axe. After all, who knows when demand for school places will rise again?

The bulldozing through, against the wishes of the vast majority of the community, the impending closure of Ysgol Gyfun Pantycelyn in Llandovery, creates a ‘dead zone’ within its catchment area of over 100 square miles. Closure also results in a 40-mile stretch of mid Wales between the comprehensive schools at Builth Wells, Powys and Ffairfach, Carmarthenshire, without any state education for children from the age of 11. Closure weakens Llandovery economically and thus its capacity to provide all the services required in its large hinterland, and closure also weakens the Welsh language. In large centralised schools, like the one intended for Ffairfach to replace both Pantycelyn and Llandeilo’s Tregib, the dominant language, English, dominates even more.

There would have been – indeed, still are – other responses to the issue of spare school places apart from complete closure, but there was no real consultation about different possibilities. Shiny and very expensive new ‘super schools’ like that intended for Ffairfach are too extravagant for the cash-strapped age in which we live, especially as so many families would rather retain the current arrangements. Even if the Welsh Government pays much of the up-front cost, to us this is no different from the county council meeting the cost – in the end it is us as taxpayers who pick up the bill.

The quality of education depends not on the physical environment of buildings but on the mental environment created by teachers, students, parents, and the community. When a school appears to be costing too much, which I believe  happened in the case of Pantycelyn, let the community decide how to increase the income, or reduce the costs. If we had a real participatory democracy like this, rather than a heavily flawed ‘representative’ version, the impact on community cohesion could be startling!

Dead Horse, Dead Community

by Pat Dodd Racher

Banging on about an unpopular issue is not the way to win friends and influence people. One issue that I bang on about is said to be a lost cause. I am accused of flogging a horse so dead it has rigor mortis. The horse is a high school, Ysgol Gyfun Pantycelyn in Llandovery, Carmarthenshire. The local authority is going to close the school. There is already an impact evident in a falling roll and in unsold homes depressing the housing market. Families don’t want to come to a town without a secondary school.

Llandovery is a small place, population under 2,000, with another 4,250 or so living in the surrounding countryside, some 100 square miles for which Llandovery is the nearest town. This swathe of hilly countryside, which includes part of the Brecon Beacons National Park, has a clear future unless current policies change. Social housing is in rapid retreat, public transport is rare, primary schools, post offices, shops and pubs have nearly all gone. The hills and valleys will become a rural playground for millionaires, who do not depend on local public services because they can afford to buy privately.

When Carmarthenshire County Council decided to close Pantycelyn and to build a new school over 13 miles to the south-west, at Ffairfach on the far side of the town of Llandeilo, public opposition was huge but had no impact on the local authority. The secondary school in Llandeilo would close too, but the replacement is a 10-minute walk, not over 13 miles.

Pantycelyn is under-occupied and by the time of intended closure in 2015 the remaining pupils will probably be rattling around a half-empty campus. Yet if we continue to shut public services because there are too few people for them to be financially viable, small towns like Llandovery and their hinterlands are locked in to a spiral of decline because no one is willing to take the risk of spending more than can be justified to achieve short-term cost-effectiveness.

Gwynedd in north Wales is also a profoundly rural county, more mountainous than Carmarthenshire overall. Gwynedd faces similar problems of apparently uneconomic small schools, and the county council asked Cardiff Business School to carry out a cost-benefit analysis of rural secondary school consolidation. The report, by James Foreman-Peck of the Welsh Institute for Research and Development, within the business school, came out in April 2011.

Mr Foreman-Peck pointed out that local authorities “are not obliged to treat losses to some people as offset by gains to others – even when the magnitudes are balanced – if a major policy concern, such as maintaining rural communities, was involved”. He drew attention to guidance from The Treasury, quoting “proposals might have differential impacts on individuals, amongst other aspects, according to their…geographical location. It is important that these distributional issues are assessed in appraisals”. Therefore, the impact of school closures on the viability of rural communities should be fully taken into account in any assessments of cost efficiency.

These impacts include job losses and the imposition of higher travel costs and longer journey times. The burdens of extra travel time should be costed, says the Cardiff Business School report, which for journeys to school suggested a figure of over £5 per pupil per hour. This should be added to the costs and environmental impacts of additional buses.

The AA’s route planner says that Ffairfach is 13.2 miles from Llandovery, and at a constant 45mph that would take just on 18 minutes. School buses, though, do not travel at a constant 45mph. They stop for children to get on or off, there are roadworks, roundabouts and especially on the way through Llandeilo, hold-ups. Llandovery to Ffairfach in a school bus would be about 25 minutes on a good day, 45 minutes on a slow day – and that is each way. With many children already having spent 15 to 30 minutes travelling into Llandovery, the extra travel burden is severe, and one that families seek to avoid by moving away.

The Treasury’s view that immediate cost savings are not necessarily synonymous with good policy-making gives local authorities the freedom to consider long-term impacts of radical changes. Emboldened with this knowledge, Carmarthenshire County Council could turn to the Integrated Community Strategy for the county. This document is supposed to guide all other policies. The community strategy aims to reduce the resources used in the county from 4.4 global hectares per head to 1.88. The biggest resource consumers are homes (21%), transport (21%) and food and drink (27%). All of these must be slashed, so any plan requiring transport to increase seems to run completely counter to the strategy.

The community strategy document has a section headed ‘Supporting opportunities for the building of economically viable and sustainable communities’ followed by several methods to accomplish this. One is ‘by developing a low carbon economy that strengthens local economies through promoting local jobs, skills, and training that strengthen communities for the future’. Another method is ‘by improving access to goods, services, jobs and learning in low-carbon ways so that that people are able to work closer to home’. Under the heading ‘Developing resilient and sustainable communities’ there is the requirement for ‘providing the infrastructure and services to enable people to live low-carbon lives’.

Both The Treasury’s guidelines for assessing the wider impacts of costed policies, and the Integrated Community Strategy, implicitly reject the narrow framing of project costs and benefits which understate, or completely ignore, longer term costs such as the terminal decline of rural areas. As the community strategy states, more local food production will be necessary. Food production requires land, and land needs people to work on it.

Dying communities are the opposite of sustainable. They create social costs as more and more services are withdrawn, and we finish where we came in, with a demographically unbalanced countryside full of independently financed millionaires and empty of nearly everyone else.