Cymdeithas yr Iaith has accused Ceredigion Council of wasting time and money with spurious public consultations which are claimed to be no more than "exercises in ticking boxes".

The consultation period closes on Monday (06/01/14) on the Council's paper proposing the new school in Llandysul, and the following week consultation closes over the Council's proposal to close Ysgol Dihewyd. Cymdeithas claim that the Council is just going through the motions of consultation while making a mockery of Government guidelines.

Cymdeithas education spokesperson Ffred Ffransis explains "Government guidelines on re-organising education insist that a Council should fully explore all alternatives before proposing to close schools. In it's desire to close all schools within miles of Llandysul and create a centralised training factory, the Council dismiss however the alternative of "multi-site co-operation" by saying that "5 sites would be difficult to manage" and that "separate Governing Bodies and budgets" would be required. This is totally incorrect as the Government Regulations on Federations (2012) clearly state that a federation of a Secondary School and the surrounding Primary Schools would be run by a single Governing Body who would have the power to aggregate the individual budgets for rationalised use for the whole federation. What is the point of a consultation process based on incorrect and biased information to promote the officers' preference ?

"Again the Language Impact Assessment (again required by Government guidelines) of the effect of closing Ysgol Dihewyd comes to the extraordinary conclusion that closing the school would benefit this Welsh-speaking community ! It is widely observed that parents starting young families are less likely to set up home in villages without schools and services and that closing a school is a basic threat to a Welsh-speaking community who use it also to assimilate newcomers. The Council's study however confines itself to the simplistic assertion that the pupils would be moved to another Welsh-medium school where their would be more pupils and so it was beneficial to the language in Dihewyd for the school to close ! This sort of nonsense occurs when reports are drawn up by bureaucrats rather than based on the experiences of people living in their communities.

"All this makes a mockery of the Government guidelines. Yet the Government are not going to hold the Council to account as they are following the Government agenda of closing schools, and officers know that villagers do not have the resources to challenge Council malpractice in the Courts. As a result Ceredigion lose more Welsh-speaking villages and people become more cynical and lose trust in local democracy. We ask what is the point of wasting time and money in spurious consultations which are no more than box-ticking exercises?"