The reason why WLGA and ADEW are objecting is because this is one of the few council proposals that has been rejected and caused ‘surprise’ because it has not simply been approved. Councils do not get it right every time, and Cardiff Council failed to do so on this occasion. Yes, the proposal reduced surplus cases but at a cost to the quality of education offered.

The WAG letter did not neglect transition arrangements at all. Until Cardiff might openly publish it responses to WAG, I cannot know what it proposed in terms of transitional arrangements. However, I do know what the council said in consultation exercises on this proposal. And that was that all Lansdowne pupils would be moved together to the Radnor site in September 2011. And your officers confirmed, as reported in the letter, that this would mean some 600 pupils (around 575 primary pupils, and 25 nursery pupils) being located in 2011 on the Radnor site.

I cannot agree more with Councillor Berman’s final comment on the need for some creative thinking, but would argue that it is better to have it much earlier in the process when proposals are generated, rather than demand it in transitional stages of any proposal.

Finally, I would be interested to hear Councillor Berman’s views on whether, as a Council, Cardiff has an obligation to keep all interested parents informed through formal channels of the ongoing debates and next steps being considered. Blogs by politicians, rather than via formal council mechanisms, seem to be the way to keep in touch on whether legal challenge is being proposed, or whether further community consultation events of uncertain formality and status are taking place…

Essentially I believe it is Labour that has created an impossible situation. It suits them electorally to push those other parties running the council into putting their names to proposals that they know will be unpopular with certain elements of the local community – as every proposal for any school closure inevitably is – and then subsequently knock those proposals back in order to win favour with those same elements of the community for riding to their rescue.

Rhodri Morgan has suggested that Carwyn Jones took the decision he did based on clear civil service advice but comparing the judgement sent to us with previous judgements, it is clear that the civil sevant who wrote it up has been incredibly careful to ascribe every single comment and view within it to the First Minister. That’s the way you write something when you are putting forward someone else’s view but don’t necessarily agree with it yourself.

And if anyone still feels I’m not being impartial, they can ask themselves why it is that the Welsh Local Government Assocation and the Association of Directors of Education in Wales have both been quick to strongly condemn the decision. They represent authorities run by all political partties, and those working for them, and they can’t be accused of having any specific local interest.

Also, people may remember Canton Labour councillor Ramesh Patel outrageously describing the Canton schools proposals as ‘ethnic cleansing’, a comment for which he subsequently had to apologise. Isn’t it a bit rich for him to now accuse others of political mudslinging?

It is Labour that has turned this issue into a party political one by telling the council to do something for policy reasons and then stopping the council from going ahead and doing it for party political reasons. That’s why I am speaking out to stimulate debate in the attempt of cutting through such an intractable situation. Unless we can cut through this and put the children of Canton first, whether in the English-medium sector or the Welsh-medium sector, it’s their education that’s going to suffer and that is surely what matters most.

It may also be useful to remind readers that the former Lib Dem administration was happily progressing a proposal to close Lansdowne before it formed a coalition with Plaid Cymru and issued the coalition agreement that included a commitment not to close Lansdowne. Both Councillor Berman’s and McEvoy’s statements now suggest that political convenience in forming that coalition at the time was at the forefront of their considerations, rather than whether they genuinely believed in what they stated in that coalition.

The answer to Berman’s question (1) highlights everything that was wrong with the proposal – it did not resolve an issue, but simply transferred it. Your own officers appear from the WAG letter to have confirmed that 575 pupils might at one time be located on the Radnor Road site.

If a solution is to be found to this issue, then we need more sophisticated thinking and less political posturing. The statement that ‘schools must close’ is itself an indication of the blunt responses our politicians come up with in response to surplus places….