Review into faith school transport in Wrexham “will not be initiated at this time”

A review into the provision of transport to faith schools in Wrexham will not be carried forward.

Currently Wrexham Council provides transport to 17 faith schools and 406 pupils across the county borough.

The service is discretionary and is provided to pupils living further than two or three miles away – regardless of whether there is a non-faith school closer to where they live.

However as part of the local authority’s recent Difficult Decisions consultation it had been proposed that a review into the service was carried out in a bid to make savings of around around £302,000.

Wrexham Council said that due to the “current financial challenge is it facing” it had no choice but to consider reviewing a large number of services.”

But in December 2018 it was reported that members of the council’s lifelong learning scrutiny committee had labelled the potential review of the free transport as ‘discriminatory’.

During the meeting it was announced that a total of 1,123 people had responded to the question in the council’s Difficult Decisions consultation, with just over half of participants agreeing that there should be a review.

Around 18 per cent of respondents voted against the proposed changes.

The suggestion has also been criticised by the headteacher of St Joseph’s Catholic and Anglican High School, which is the only faith-based secondary school in the area.

Speaking at last month’s meeting Liberal Democrat group leader Cllr Alun Jenkins, said: “It’s discriminatory and in terms of equality and Human Rights it’s something we shouldn’t be pursuing.

“I know that if the shoe was on the other foot and we were talking about charges being made for parents of children who had chosen to go to Welsh education, then I would be feeling extremely annoyed that the suggestion was being put forward.

“If we can’t discriminate against those that have chosen on the grounds of language then we shouldn’t discriminate against those that have chosen on grounds of faith either.”

A majority of committee members voted in favour of not taking the review forward.

It has now been confirmed that a review into the faith school transport “will not be initiated at this time”.

Public responses / themes from the Difficult Decisions Consultation

Leader of Wrexham Council, Cllr Mark Pritchard, said a “long discussion” had taken place between the political groups within the alliance – made up of independents and conservatives – and that it had been agreed that the review will not be taken forward.

He said: “A lot of people say, ‘they go out for consultation, they don’t listen, they do what they want to do and their minds are already made up. I can assure you that isn’t the case.

“What we do is we send it out for consultation, we see what feedback comes back and then we have the discussions. We’ve always done that, some people don’t believe that’s factual, but it is.

“I’d like to thank everybody who took part in the consultation and put their thoughts and made their points known.”

Chief executive of Wrexham Council, Ian Bancroft, added: “The consultation brought out a really important debate. We were not reviewing, we were consulting on whether we should review

“What that means is by doing that early on we have been able to have a good debate with key people who understand the issue, that includes a range of headteachers and those people impacted, it has brought the debate out.”

He added: “I think we were absolutely right to put it out there in terms of this consultation as I think it shows that we wouldn’t want to be doing this, but the fact of the budgetary situation we’re in is we have to consider these things otherwise we would not be doing our job properly.

“The consultation has done exactly in this instance what it was set out to do, which is create an early and short debate that means we know the scope of the issue and whether it’s worth progressing to a review.”