Carmarthenshire Council closes Ysgol Pantycelyn against tide of public opinion

Carmarthenshire Council this week had one of its first big meetings since the now-infamous #daftarrest incident last month.

That day, when the council announced it would close Llandeilo’s Noddfa Teilo Day Club, the local authority got an unprecedented amount of attention, most of it negative.

On Monday the executive board approved the closure of Ysgol Pantycelyn, in Llandovery.

This act garnered no coverage in the national media, no celebrity columnist comments, but it was opposed by 91 per cent of those involved in the public consultation – that is, local parents, teachers, governors, and residents in surrounding area.

As with the closure of Noddfa Teilo, this was a decision rather than a debate. Council procedure meant objectors, including Pantycelyn chair of governors Dai Dyer, were stopped from speaking.

Despite the widespread public disapproval executive board member for education  Gwynne Wooldridge told the chamber:

We have reached another milestone in the transformation of Dinefwr schools.

It is the most inventive scheme I have ever come across and will benefit the children fantastically.

Pupil numbers at the school – now at around 300 – have plummeted, and there is a large deficit.

But talking to parents, teachers, and governors in the months before and days after the debate it is clear some questions are still unanswered about the consultation process (the document can be found in PDF format here).

The closure of Pantycelyn, part of a county-wide schools reshuffle, is the first stage in a plan to merge it with Ffairfach’s Ysgol Tre-Gib. The new Dyffyn Tywi School, as it would be called, would also be built in Ffairfach, near to the current site of Tre-Gib, but 13 miles away from Pantycelyn.

Residents of both Llandeilo and Llandovery are especially concerned about the position of the new building. Almost 150 of them wrote letters of objection. But the council has accused campaigners of proliferating misinformation in an attempt to raise this figure, a claim which the campaigners angrily deny.

Moreover, the council appeared to bring forward the date of the decision overnight without telling anyone. This was originally scheduled for the autumn.
This meant Mr Dyer and the other school governors were only able to attend after Radio Cymru told them about the date change two days before.

Rob Sully, the council’s director of education, said the authority’s previous statement, that the decision would be made in the autumn, was down to a “drafting error”.  But in councillor Wooldridge told me at the Carmarthen Journal two months ago:

A report is now being prepared taking all the information gathered through this consultation into account and it will go before the Executive Board in the Autumn.

Perhaps Mr Wooldridge, the most senior councillor when it comes to education, didn’t know the date and merely took the consultation document – and its “draft error” – at face value? If that is not the case, though, it puts Mr Sully’s statement in a bit of an odd light.

Many campaigners, namely the Ysgol Pantycelyn Action Group and their vociferous secretary Marianne Goddard-Peperzak, opposed the closure completely. But not all of the objecting 91 per cent opposed the closure outright. Some, including the the school governors, had conceded the inevitability of the council’s will to close the building – indeed, the Welsh Government had already pledged £23.7 million towards to the build in March, months before the consultation ended.

What this contingent opposed was the council proposal to put the new school at a site in Ffairfach (the flag on the above map). They suggested a far better location would have been at Llangadog (the question mark), almost bang in the middle of the two current schools.

Their main concerns about the Ffairfach site were:

1. Claims it is on a flood plain.
2. It would increase congestion and pollution in Llandeilo, which is already at record levels.
3. Travel times for children taking the 14 mile-bus route from north of Llandovery would be unacceptable.
4. The closure would have a detrimental effect of the town of Llandovery, making it one of the only areas in Wales without a state secondary school within ten miles and therefore an unattractive prospect for young families.

The council have responded in their documentation:

In addition, the council has accused campaigners of running an “orchestrated campaign” of misinformation, designed to get people to object.

Perhaps this is the reasoning the council making a decision which is diametrically opposed to the vast majority of people it affects: that it feels many of the objections were unfairly influenced by this so-called propaganda and were therefore not valid?

If so, its position poses two questions: 1) did the council take into account how many of the objections had been influenced in this way, and 2) to what extent was this a factor in pushing through plans it had drawn up months ago?