The Friends of Llanfyllin High School have taken legal advice and strongly believe the Council’s decision can be challenged and can be overturned. This initial fund raising is to provide the means to research legal options by taking specialist advice, with a view to finding ways to make Powys County Council Cabinet reconsider and instead allow Llanfyllin High school to continue to subsidise the transport cost of children from out of catchment areas.

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Currently nearly 200 pupils come to Llanfyllin HS from out of catchment and this provides the school with an additional income equivalent to nearly a quarter of its total budget. This additional funding allows the school to offer a much broader range of curriculum opportunities than would otherwise be possible – and so all pupils at the school benefit from this arrangement. As a result, for many years, Llanfyllin HS has had the largest sixth form in Powys offering more A level and vocational course options than any other school in Powys. It also currently has the largest year 7 in Powys. 

The participation of such a large number of out of catchment pupils at Llanfyllin HS has been made possible by the school’s longstanding practice of subsidising travel costs. However, on 22nd March 2016 Powys Cabinet decided to enforce compliance with a regulation which means that the school has to stop this support to pupils’ travel. If this decision is not overturned many pupils will be forced to change school because their families will not be able to afford the increased charges; and the conditions imposed by the Council mean that the school may in fact not be able to run any bus services at all. This decision also has implications for the school’s continued provision of a broad curriculum and hence the continued success of the whole school – and so impacts on all pupils and stakeholders.

Up until now the school has operated a discount scheme for families on low incomes and for families with two or more children. The Cabinet’s decision requires Llanfyllin HS to scrap these schemes, so some families, including those on low incomes will see their transport costs rise by £2000 or more. The Cabinet’s decision took no account of these impacts on individual students and their families. Some students will be in the middle of GCSE and A level course combinations which will not be available at other schools. Some children have special educational needs which will make a forced move to a different school particularly difficult and disruptive. Others will be denied the opportunity to learn Welsh or study through Welsh Medium when they had particularly chosen Llanfyllin High School for this reason.

When Cabinet made its decision in March 2016 to prevent Llanfyllin High School from using its delegated budget on transport, it also considered an option presented by the education portfolio holder to allow the school to continue. The advice given to Cabinet was that there was no legal obstacle to agreeing to this. The Cabinet’s decision was in part based on an assumption that Llanfyllin HS was the only school in Powys using its budget in this way. It has since emerged that this is not the case – there are 2 other schools doing the same.

Cabinet were also presented with figures that suggested subsidising buses cost the local authority money – in fact if these extra students were not enrolled at Llanfyllin, the council’s funding formula for its schools shows it would cost an extra £130,000 to £275,000 per year to subsidise small year groups but still provide these with fewer curriculum opportunities than currently available. If the additional income to fund post-16 and GCSE courses is taken into account, plus other savings on transport, and income for special educational needs, then the material benefit to the local authority is in the region of £400,000 to £500,000 per year.

In March 2016, Powys County Council set up an independent inquiry into all the circumstances connected with non-compliance with regulation 5.2, led by a barrister. The inquiry is due to report at the end of May 2016. Some governors at Llanfyllin High School have said that the County Council were always aware of the non-compliance and tacitly approved it because all parties benefitted from the arrangement - they have also questioned why Cabinet did not wait for the outcome of the inquiry before imposing compliance. Many people have also been asking why Powys made the choice to do this in the middle of a schools modernisation process.