New Plans for Secondary Schools

I walked into the middle of an animated debate in the newsagents this morning. The subject was the front page headline in the B&R - "Gwernyfed and Brecon High to Close".
The County Council wants to completely re-organise the secondary schools in the county, and as part of this grand plan, they want to close both Gwernyfed High School and Brecon High School and move them both to a new "Brecon Learning Campus" in Brecon - on the site of the present Brecon High School. At the moment, Gwernyfed is rated "effective" by the Welsh Assembly inspectors, and Brecon High is in special measures.
They also want to merge Llandrindod Wells and Builth Wells schools, and move all Welsh medium teaching to Builth - which is a heck of a long way to go from Hay every morning if you want a Welsh language education for your children.
The plans for the schools would also finish off a plan to re-develop the Brecon leisure centre, which is next door to Brecon High - and which is going to be transferred to a private contractor later this year.
The councillor in charge of schools says that there aren't enough pupils in Powys, and that's why they will have to start merging schools.

Needless to say, the two ladies discussing the plans in the newsagents thought the councillors were all mad.
"I bet they won't have thought about the cost of bussing all those kids half way across the county," one said (I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it).

The new Campus would cost £50 million, and not re-developing the Leisure Centre would save £70 million. And then they'd have a spare site at Gwernyfed to dispose of, as well.

We've seen grand schemes like this before, though, and not so long ago. The grand plan for primary schools was to shut the small village schools and consolidate the pupils in larger schools. One of those larger schools was supposed to be Hay. Some of the smaller schools have, indeed, closed, but there's still no sign of any building work in Hay to accomodate the extra children, or the existing children who have been waiting for a new school building for years. They don't seem to have mentioned any of these plans to the schools before they were announced publically, either. The headmaster of Gwernyfed said the whole school was in a state of shock, especially since they had been doing so well.