My personal contribution to the Save Gwernyfed High School Consultation, which closed this week:
As a Gwernyfed High School Governor and as Powys County Councillor for Talgarth, I endorse 100% the collective submission made by the GHS Governing Body - and associate myself wholeheartedly with it. The submission below is in a personal capacity, and I hope that these observations too will be taken into account by Powys County Council Cabinet.
In the debate surrounding the future of Gwernyfed High School, a very relevant factor for me is that I attended the school during the 1970's and early 1980's and, since I became a County Councillor in 2004, I have also been a governor of the school. Gwernyfed represents the focal point for quite a dispersed rural community. It is fed by the two main towns of Hay and Talgarth and the many villages and farmsteads of a deeply rural hinterland, close to the Herefordshire border. The identity of our community and its many achievements are very well tied in with the school. It is in this guise that I am most committed to the campaign to save the school from the threat of closure.
The potential closure of Gwernyfed would have a multi-layered community impact, the predominant one being the undermining of confidence of the local community and its destabilisation. It is a matter of public record that we are living in an area with the fastest escalating average age per head of population in Wales. I think if the community is denied its successful local secondary school, our community is going to have very serious problems. This will doubtless be reflected in the local housing market and will also make it less attractive for younger people, looking to have families in the near future. This would have a profoundly detrimental impact upon the shape and character of the local community - and undermine its sustainability.
For current families and young people, it would represent the effective atomisation of the current community in that people will look to live - or have their children attend schools - further afield. In my opinion, people will be looking to go over the English border for sixth form and other post-16 provision. This will also lead to Welsh pupils being relocated into the network of English primary and secondary primary schools feeding into that post 16 provision. In my opinion, we would then see a radical fall away in pupil numbers on the Powys side of the border and that would prove to be very, very damaging.
For the students, they would have significantly longer travel times and their associations with the local community would be strained and in many cases broken - as many are forced to make different choices. As I have just mentioned, people will seek education elsewhere and even look at the private sector, if their circumstances allow. Alongside the additional travelling time, we also really need to look at the proven track record of the other educational providers involved in these proposals. Enhancement of educational standards is, after all, meant to be the engine of school modernisation.
We all understand that costs matter in education - there's no doubt about that - but it is how they are managed that is important. These things have to be strategic. There have been assumptions made about how docile parents and students are about doing what they have been told to do. If the assumption is that you will save tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds a year by doing things a certain way, you've got to be clear that the parents will actually follow that and that parents and students will comply. I maintain that things haven't been clear and so people are not prepared simply to do as they are being encouraged to do.
There is recent empirical evidence of parents making choices and actually taking students out of our area. This then skews the alleged benefits of the rationalisation. I am of the view - and I think parents are of that view too - that instead of a high school amalgamation there should be a co-location of primary and secondary schools on the Brecon HS site, whilst retaining Gwernyfed HS. The school may be smaller than average but it is strategically important to keep a high performing school in the area because otherwise you have a fragmentation of provision and the people within the community face an unacceptable dilemma.
You then can have dozens or even hundreds of pupils being deprived of being part of the Welsh education system at all. There are, of course, the cultural disadvantages to which I have referred but I don't think it helps the sums to add up either, as pupils are lost over the border, together with the funding they attract - and, crucially, the vitality that they would bring to our communities in the future is also lost.
Rural schools play an important part in providing a network of communication in areas such as ours and especially for some students who live in relative isolation. Paradoxically, that's more of a danger now with the advent of the internet. An actual sense of community is so important and that is where the school plays such a vital part in being the venue of social clubs, activity clubs, etc. Of course the Gwernyfed Rugby Club's campaign has become an iconic part of the campaign to save the school. Despite the Club not actually being on the school site anymore, it is still very much tied to its traditions there and it would suffer acutely by potential closure - as would many other organisations. It is again that same issue of keeping generations of young people together, as well as promoting the best interests of both young and old.
I believe that it is really important to retain the current school network so as to offer good opportunities for the teaching staff and management team to develop their teaching careers in a setting like ours. The local AM Kirsty Williams and I have also tried to develop this kind of rural dimension with health care provision. Rather than just saying: 'oh you can't do that, we're a rural area so you can't have that degree of specialism'. There's actually a positive benefit to having a rural setting; a professional's career can be uniquely developed in a rural setting and it is critical to explore that potential to the full.
For all the reasons that I have outlined, I am urging the Cabinet of Powys County Council to revisit the existing proposals, and - as I urged at the Cabinet meeting of 24th March 2015 - to come forward with a better, and more coherent plan - and one that will command widespread support, not just of the Welsh Government, but crucially also the support of those communities whose best interests we were elected to serve.
William Powell
Powys County Councillor for Talgarth
Cllr.William.Powell@powys.gov.uk
@WilliamPowell2016
Many thanks to Councillor Powell for his contribution.
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