Welsh language campaigners have called on the Welsh Government Education Secretary to “take advantage” of the current review of the School Organisation Code to “provide clear guidance” to councils following a “completely muddled” situation in Ceredigion.

Cymdeithas yr Iaith’s call to Lynne Neagle came as Ceredigion County Council's Cabinet voted to reverse a previous decision to hold statutory consultation on proposals to close four of the county’s rural Welsh-language schools.

Ffred Ffransis, of Cymdeithas yr Iaith’s Education Group, said that by deleting the statutory consultations and treating the responses as an "informal consultation", “we will by default do what should have been done in the first place”, in “holding a broad discussion from the outset, exploring every way to avoid closing a rural school, before deciding on a proposal.”

“Unfortunately, the council believed that they could comply with the Code by going through the motions, deciding first to close schools in order to make savings to their budget, and then name alternative options simply to reject each one with the same generic sentence,” he said.

“Lynne Neagle needs to state clearly that the Government is serious about the policy in order to avoid a similar situation in the future, which has caused so much distress for parents, children, governors and for the council itself in Ceredigion."

While introducing the presumption against closing rural schools in the autumn of 2018, the Education Secretary at the time, Kirsty Williams, said authorities with schools on the list “should start on the basis that closure is the last option” and that “presumption against a closure and the option to seek alternatives to keeping a school open should not be left to the official consultation period, but should be employed by the council before they make any decision to go out to consultation on the future of the school'.