Why is Plaid closing schools in Welsh-speaking heartlands?

Carmarthenshire Council’s Education, Young People and Welsh Language Scrutiny Committee faces a historic decision.

Ffred Ffransis, Cymdeithas yr Iaith’s veteran campaigner, has described the plans to close three primary schools in Cwm Gwendraeth — in addition to the pending decision on Ysgol Llangyndeyrn on Wednesday — as the biggest threat to the Welsh language in the area since the closure of the pits in the 1980s.

Indeed, it is difficult not to interpret the plans as a direct attack on one of the few traditional working-class communities in south Wales where Welsh remains a community language.

A sense that Cwm Gwendraeth has been explicitly targeted is unavoidable when four of the seven schools so far identified for closure by the county council are in the area.

This is part of a longer-term project that will undoubtedly target further schools and which the council has rather ironically called a “modernisation” programme. However, there has been no reference to capital investment or school improvements in the affected areas, as there was when similar plans were carried out in Ceredigion.

It is notable that this imminent disaster is not being visited on the community by the Conservatives. Nor is it coming from a Labour Party that has, in practice, long taken the same approach of managed decline towards the old coalfield as it has towards the Welsh language.

One might be forgiven for supposing that only a right-wing English nationalist party as ideologically committed as Reform would have the motivation and brass neck to carry out such sweeping cuts in an iconic Welsh-language community and current Plaid stronghold.

This is an area immortalised in S4C’s long-running soap opera Pobl y Cwm, whose writers might struggle to dream up this story.

It is, in fact, a Plaid-led council that is seeking to administer the hatchet job.

The sense of injustice is only deepened by the fact that the consultation on Bancffosfelen has been prepared on the basis of a soon-to-be-outdated Estyn report. Meanwhile, pupils and parents in Carwe had been promised a return to their school building by the council, after nearly a year of pupils being bused back and forth to Ysgol Gwynfryn in Pontiets because of building work.

The bigger picture

Of course, what cannot be ignored here is the looming £16 million overspend in schools across the authority over two years, which reflects wider, ongoing issues that will no doubt feel familiar to those in other parts of Wales.

Some of these can be regarded as localised issues — the hundreds of children being home-schooled, for example. However, declining birth rates, depopulation and demographic change mean there are empty places across the county’s schools.

And there is, of course, the never-ending tightening of budgets delivered by Cardiff Bay on behalf of Westminster, which means local authorities have so much less to spend. Meanwhile, health seems to have become a budgetary black hole into which good money is thrown after bad.

Indeed, it reminds us that, alongside pressing Andy Burnham on the devolution of further powers, the First Minister should be delivering the message that an ongoing lack of funding is unsustainable.

The downstream effect is what we are seeing here: a move not to modernise education services, but to close schools wherever possible at a rate of knots, on the assumption that this is what needs to be done.

There is seemingly no strategic planning or regard for the children involved and the disruption to their education, or for the wider implications for the communities and the Welsh language.

Heartlessness

The plans to close schools over the Christmas holidays are particularly malicious and speak to the heartlessness of politicians and officers alike in their hurry to smash the souls of the schools for which they are meant to be custodians.

At bottom, there is no clear evidential basis for the benefits of closing smaller schools. Furthermore, in the context of a budget shortfall of millions, the savings are negligible. In reality, this is neither an adequate nor an appropriate “solution” to the problem.

Director of Education Owain Lloyd and his officers may be seen to be busy producing endless papers and organising consultations, but let us not suppose these adequately address the real issues at hand.

And lest we forget, this is happening while the Welsh Government has rightly committed to putting into practice the principles of the Commission for Welsh-speaking Communities.

When the minister responsible for education and the Welsh language made her statement in July, it was noted explicitly that “Safeguarding communities of higher linguistic density is core to the work of supporting the Welsh language”. Schools are crucial to that work.

It beggars belief in this context that one of the few Plaid Cymru-led councils in Wales is hell-bent on defying the spirit and ambition of the Welsh Government by continuing to rush headlong into closing primary schools in some of the communities in Carmarthenshire where that linguistic density remains at its strongest.

Anna Brychan should call for a moratorium on school closures so that the commission’s principles can be put into practice and a wider all-Wales framework established to guide policymaking.

This would help ensure decisions reflect those aims, rather than being dictated by myopic bean-counting that has no grasp of the wider issues at stake.

Is Carmarthenshire quitting y Fro Gymraeg?

It should be remembered that Sir Gâr is one of the counties that has seen the most dramatic decline in the number and proportion of Welsh speakers over the past twenty years. Indeed, whether it can meaningfully remain part of y Fro Gymraeg is a test case for the Plaid government.

Yet rather than taking a responsible, long-term and joined-up approach that looks at school provision in the wider context of our communities’ wealth and wellbeing, its colleagues in local government seem hell-bent on measures that can only tip those communities further towards the linguistic precipice.

So Plaid politicians at both local and national level need to look not just in the mirror, but into the recesses of their souls. For what is Plaid to stand for if not our communities and the Welsh language?

As a national government, Plaid must not wash its hands of this when everyone knows that, procedurally and politically, local and national government are both involved in the delivery of education.

And at a local level, when those Plaid councillors who sit on the scrutiny committee convene, they need to ask themselves whether they came into politics to sign away the future of the communities they represent or to stand up on their behalf.

They should urge caution and reject these proposals. It is up to them how they will be remembered.

Huw Williams is a parent governor at Ysgol Pontiets.