The Blue Print

The South Wales Echo http://bit.ly/c5h11y is today reporting that Cardiff Council expect to resolve the problem of school places in Canton by building a new Welsh medium primary school.

I know that many people in that area will be delighted that those in the Welsh medium sector will get this investment; for many years the expansion of this sector has been based on taking over existing buildings that had been occupied by English medium schools. I admit that this isn’t the best way to provide the additional capacity.

In fact the construction of a new Welsh medium school is exactly what I and our Councillors in Whitchurch argued for there.

The Council’s original proposals for Canton are very similar to those published for Whitchurch, effectively a decrease in pupil places in English medium with an expansion to cope with demand in the Welsh medium sector. Our view was ignored by the Council who maintained that the options they published were the best, claiming that they couldn’t provide for an expansion to Welsh medium places without dealing with the “problem of surplus places” in the English schools.

The Council’s intention is to give Canton what we argued for in Whitchurch. I have always maintained that Whitchurch benefits from having excellent schools regardless of which language the children are taught. We have seen our community turn in on itself, fuelled by a Council so insensitive that it couldn’t see the pitfalls of designing the reorganisation in this way.

If the children in Canton can benefit from this investment, which I welcome, then so should the children in Whitchurch.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 21st, 2010 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Constituency matters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.