More primary schools should close, council committee told

More primary schools need to close in Powys as the council should give more money to its cash-strapped secondary schools, a committee has heard.

At a meeting of Powys County Council’s (PCC) Governance and Audit Committee on Friday, September 25, the ongoing financial problems in county schools were brought up as part of discussions around the authority’s response to a Panel Performance Assessment.

As well as responding to a highly critical report by education watchdog Estyn, the council is trying to rectify years of funding issues in Powys schools, which see the secondary sector carrying a collective deficit of £6.5 million.

The Panel Performance Assessment (PPA) took place in April.

The panel, which is mostly made up of councillors and senior staff from other local authorities, had made nine recommendations on improvements Powys Council could make.

Committee chairwoman and independent lay member Lynne Hamilton said: “There’s a really strong theme in the PPA report around education.”

Mrs Hamilton explained that she was “really struck and curious” about a couple of paragraphs in the report which said that the council’s “long-term financial sustainability is not yet secured and the pressures evident in education illustrate the wider scale and complexity of the council’s MTFS (Medium Term Financial Strategy) position.”

Mrs Hamilton continued: “Education got a special mention in the context of the overall wellbeing, financial health and sustainability of the county – it jumped off the page for me.”

Council leader Cllr Jake Berriman (Liberal Democrat – Llandrindod North) said: “It should be no surprise that it’s one of our big spending areas.”

He explained that the demographic trend in Powys, with an ageing population and fewer young people, means fewer children are going through the school system.

A second problem, Cllr Berriman explained, is “the disproportionality of where the funding sits within the school sector.

“A heavy amount of funding by way of subsidy goes into smaller primary schools, which could be argued is starving resource in the secondary sector.”

Chief executive Emma Palmer said: “Whilst education standards is first and foremost and has to be our focus, moving beyond that and the MTFS, that point is the fact that we’ve still got too many schools in the organisation.”

She explained that the council had to pay for “additional expertise” to help raise the quality of “teaching and learning”, which “isn’t good enough”, and that schools needed to come out of Estyn categories.

Ms Palmer said: “They need to be better overall, but there are also some political decisions that need to be made on education in Powys.

“We currently have £13.5 million worth of top-up in the budget to sustain the current infrastructure that we have.”

Ms Palmer said that this “isn’t producing the outcomes we need” or what pupils in Powys “deserve”.

She added that this change is needed to produce people with the skills to “drive the economy” in Powys.

“These are intertwined, we have to give this the attention it deserves to drive Powys forward,” stressed Ms Palmer.

The committee went on to note the report.

By Elgan Hearn, Local Democracy Reporitng Service