IF YOU’RE a student in Gwynedd heading towards GCSEs and fancy going on to higher education you won’t be stuck for somewhere to take A-levels. All the county’s seven comprehensive schools run sixth-forms.
In Powys, 11 of 12 secondary schools have sixth-forms. Of Carmarthenshire’s 12 secondaries, eight offer sixth-form courses; in Pembrokeshire, five of six comprehensives do the same.
Then there’s Ceredigion. For now, there are sixth-forms at all six secondary schools. But maybe not for long. Because if a hare-brained, and frankly callous, county council plan is allowed to gain traction, there may soon remain not a single sixth-form across the entire county.
This insane proposal, waved through by the county council’s malleable cabinet, basically offers two choices, both unacceptable. Close some sixth-forms. Or the whole lot.
This second would mean that, at a stroke, hundreds of Ceredigion teenagers a year could lose out on higher education, putting a blight on their intellectual, cultural and social development and seriously undermining career prospects.
The repercussions could be life-changing. Futures full of brightness and hope could be snuffed out, to be substituted by pinched existences and foreshortened horizons.
The council’s reckless alternative to the shut-’em-all plan? Establish a grandly-named and vaguely described ‘centre of excellence’, which would be outside the council’s control and probably located at Ysgol Aberaeron. According to a council report, this option is supported by chief executive Eifion Evans. This may cause some hearts to sink.
The report, however, concedes that such seismic undermining of the present system would “destabilise Ceredigion’s current post-16 organisation” and – let’s hope this turns out to be the case – “could create significant local opposition”.
It adds that “staff and unions could see this option as one that would threaten job security and morale. That could create significant uncertainty in the schools.” As a statement of the obvious, this can’t be faulted.
For post-16 students living any appreciable distance from Aberaeron, especially north of Aberystwyth, centralisation in south Ceredigion would make further study impossible. The effective abandonment of such pupils would be the greatest single indictment against a plan in any case heartless and without caring for young people’s futures.
The council pleads poverty. Post-16 schooling, it claims, costs more than it can continue to afford, the £3.7m it gets from a Welsh government grant for that purpose being about £1.5m below what’s needed. “All but one school in Ceredigion have to use core 11-16 funding to varying degrees to maintain their sixth forms”, the report says.
This from an authority with a current year revenue spending budget of £224.2m, a £23.3m increase on 2022-23. An 11.6 per cent rise that is the second highest – after Gwynedd – among the five west Wales counties.
The others all find their sixth-forms affordable – why doesn’t Ceredigion?
Council spending based on population is far lower in Carmarthenshire, Powys and Pembrokeshire than in Ceredigion, but they all manage to pay for post-16 schooling.
Why can’t Ceredigion make ends meet?
One peripheral reason may be that numbers of Ceredigion sixth-form students fell from 535 in 2014-15 to 390 in 2020-21, which in 2022-23 resulted in a £273,000 (7.05 per cent) cut in Welsh government funding for post-16. Clearly, this reduction could be only a temporary setback, though the council’s effective vote of no confidence in the future of sixth-forms will do nothing to encourage students to stay on.
But another, far bigger, reason is the millions paid out every year in interest on accumulated council borrowing from the Public Works Loan Board, a lending facility for local authorities for capital projects.
Latest figures, from June, show the authority with total outstanding debts of £107,811,980 from 40 loans taken out between 1971 and 2020.
In 2022-23 alone, £4.638m was paid out in interest on external borrowing, £510,000 less than the £5.148m budgeted for.
So here’s a happy coincidence. The sum the council calls a “favourable variance” more than matches the £408,519 it estimates to be the current year’s shortfall in the government’s sixth-form grant. No need for them to worry about plugging that gap, then.
Is this the way forward? As with this year, the authority may like to fix a debt interest budget that’s on the generous side, and use the surplus to supplement the sixth-form fund.
This may be seen as a frivolous suggestion. On the other hand, is it any less sound than decisions over expensive capital loans whose legacy may be the current very serious threat to the futures of hundreds of Ceredigion school students?
Think Canolfan Rheidol, the £16m white elephant suite of council offices which echoes with the absence of its hundreds of now home-working staff. A dodgy enterprise from the start, hatched in 2007 behind closed doors, launched without public consultation.
This column has for some time been asking the present administration how much was borrowed to build and equip it, and how much debt remains. It has refused to say. A freedom of information request – which shouldn’t be necessary – looks inevitable.
Red benches beckon Dog and Duck landlord
IF THEY have a spare moment, Welsh MPs may like to ask Rishi Sunak whether he sees Britain’s unwritten constitution as endlessly obliging when it comes to bypassing voters in his selection of members of the cabinet.
I make the suggestion only because I think it would be fascinating if the prime minister told us how – or more likely if – he attempts to justify appointing as foreign secretary a member of the public who is not an MP and whose suitability to hold one of the great offices of state has in any case not been even remotely the subject of public discussion or assessment.
At the same time, I’m assuming we’d all like to know how – or more likely if – Sunak may try to justify David Cameron’s appointment via the staggeringly disreputable route of the overnight invention of a peerage, while presumably at the same time hoping to curry favour with voters in the run-up to the general election by bringing on board a leading enabler of Brexit.
In this last, the prime minister will prove himself an inept strategist. Does he really think people will have have forgotten about Cameron’s capitulation to the rabble-rousing anti-Europe hysteria orchestrated by Nigel Farage and the consequent referendum he never wanted and went on to lose, to Britain’s huge economic disadvantage?
Equally, he surely can’t believe memories are so short that everyone will have forgotten that the austerity programme introduced in 2010 by Cameron and George Osborne, following the 2008 financial crisis, not only targeted the poor and disadvantaged but probably prolonged the recession. (Historical note: 75,000 disabled people had their Motability cars taken away because of tightened benefit eligibility.)
Following’s Cameron’s precipitate elevation, one question now is whether, emboldened by his bypassing of the electorate, Sunak will perhaps be considering pushing the boat out and having a complete cabinet clear-out, replacing present incumbents with, amongst others, a couple of farmer neighbours in his north Yorkshire constituency, the chap who did such a fine job reroofing his country house and the landlord of the Dog and Duck in Pickering.
Is he sensing endless scope for constitutional extension and renewal, together with a gratifyingly enormous saving in time and energy compared with the present slow, tiresomely circuitous and often controversial process of constituency-focused candidate-selection?
Appointments to cabinet, Sunak may well be concluding, are too important to be left to decisions involving the great unwashed.
In any case, he may reason, the Commons’ present cramped seating arrangements could at any moment become a matter of investigation by the Health and Safety Executive if numbers aren’t thinned out, while it’s obvious from television coverage of the Lords that there’s acres of room left on the red benches.
24 November 2023
Bronterre News 