Cymdeithas yr Iaith has welcomed the announcement by Coun. Dyfed Edwards (Holder of Education Portfolio in Gwynedd) that the plan to re-organise dozens of Gwynedd schools into federations has been suspended for a year to allow consideration of the new possibilities for collaboration between schools which are anticipated in new Assembly guidelines shortly to be published. The Society has called on everyone to use the year to work out local solutions "from the bottom-up". Cymdeithas has also pointed out that the closure threat to 7 Welsh-medium village schools in the county during the coming year still remains.

Cymdeithas Organiser in the north, Osian Jones, commented:"We welcome this development and believe that a willingness to listen and change policies is a sign of strength rather than weakness. We also congratulate all those who have been campaigning for their schools and communities. We have argued from the start that it would be totally impractical to go through the laborious statutory process of deciding the future of two dozen schools in the county within a year, and that it would be senseless to attempt to do that before we knew of the new possibilities for clustering arrangements between schools to be revealed in the new Assembly guidelines.""We recognise that Gwynedd Council has shown a willingness to engage with local communities in open-ended discussions - unlike counties such as Carmarthenshire who are intent on pushing through their agenda at all costs. We call therefore on the Council and all concerned to make good use of the next year in holding informal meetings in each area to seek consensus about local solutions designed from the bottom up.""We wish to point out that the threat of closure for 7 village schools in Gwynedd still remains this coming year, and the Council still seem intent on a dash to implement the statutory processes to decide their future during the last 4 weeks of the summer term. Given that most of the consultation plans for next year have been suspended, it would make much more sense to allow a full period to discuss the fate of these schools in the Autumn term."