Diolch, Llywydd. I formally move the motion tabled in my name. From a young age, I learnt a valuable lesson—that bigger is not always better. I was perhaps 12 when my small community school was merged with a much bigger one. We lost the personal relationships with our teachers, becoming just another face in the sea of faces. Thankfully, back then, such mergers were rare, and community schools were allowed to continue offering quality personal teaching. Unfortunately, successive Governments of all political hues failed to invest in those schools, allowing far too many of them to fall into disrepair. While we welcome the recent investment via the twenty-first century schools programme, it is too little, too late for many community schools forced to close not because they offered poor education—far from it—but because it was more cost-effective to close them and transfer their pupils to a superschool.

In my own region, Neath Port Talbot council, with their laughably titled strategic school improvement programme, closed Cymer Afan Comprehensive School and primary schools in the Afan valley to create a new 1,200-pupil co-educational school for pupils aged three to 16. The council went against the wishes of pupils, parents and elected officials. Councillors Scott Jones, Ralph Thomas and Nicola-Jayne Davies fought tooth and nail for their communities. Parents even took the council to the High Court and their case was dismissed, not because it had no merit, but because the judges ruled that judicial review was not the appropriate way to enforce the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015.

These mergers are not about improving the education of young people; they are, above all, about saving money. Local authorities have been allowed to rip the hearts out of many communities in order to protect budgets and to avoid hundreds of millions of pounds of repair backlogs. These superschools are usually far away from a lot of the communities that they serve, forcing pupils into long commutes. It's not unusual for pupils to face a two-hour round trip each day. Not only is this detrimental to the well-being of young people and can impact their educational attainment, but it forces pupils to abandon active travel. If it takes an hour by car or bus, how could young people be expected to walk or cycle? And we are in a climate emergency, but yet again, we're putting economics before the environment. To save costs, we're forcing more and more young people to rely upon vehicular transport, rather than planet-friendly active travel. What message does that send to future generations?

I urge Members to reject the amendments put forward and to support our motion. Thank you very much. Diolch yn fawr iawn.