The Education Act 1996 says that pupils should be educated in accordance with parents’ wishes, and that the Secretary of State should have regard to the general principle that pupils are to be educated in accordance with the wishes of their parents. That legislation has, of course, been overtaken since devolution, but the principle behind it, I think, should be pretty non-controversial. I presume that is why there was a consultation process, which was conducted by Carmarthenshire County Council in the case of Llangennech school and the proposals that they have to merge the two existing schools into one Welsh-medium-only school. But if the purpose of a consultation is to seek public opinion, particularly of those most closely affected by the decision, who are, of course, the parents of the children whose lives are going to be most deeply affected by the education that they are to receive, this is one that has not succeeded.

The consultation has been a lengthy one. In January 2016, there was an initial consultation on the proposals and there were 154 responses that were in favour, 102 against. There was one anonymous response in favour, and 32 anonymous results against, but there was a petition with 505 names on it that was counted as one vote. If you take individual voices as an indication of public opinion, which is the obvious thing to do, then I’m afraid that Llangennech voted heavily against the proposal of the county council. There was another consultation, or extension of the consultation, when the statutory notice was published later in the year, and the results then were 1,418 responses altogether, of which 698 were in favour of what the county council proposed and 720 were against. But only 44 per cent of those responses can be positively identified as being from people who live in and around the village—25 per cent came from outside and 31 per cent were respondees who gave no address or postcode, or any other means of identifying where they were from. There was a petition, which, this time, had 757 names on it from Llangennech, but that, similarly, counts as one vote only in this process.

Now, the county council quite rightly says in the document that summarised all these results that,

The decision on whether or not to proceed with the proposal must, by virtue of the law, be made on the grounds of the best interests of learners. It is therefore, the educational merits that must be the determining factor in decision making, rather than the number of responses received in favour or against the proposal.’

And I agree with that, that actual arithmetical numbers shouldn’t necessarily be the sole determinant of the decision that is made, but, ultimately, I do think that we should respect the views of parents unless a compelling case to the contrary can be made, and I don’t think, in this particular instance, that it has. Of course, there is a massive cultural value to having children learning to speak Welsh, as well as English, and I’m in favour of bilingualism. But, unfortunately, one of the developments in recent—