The Last Bell

Ysgol Pen-y-Waun has eleven pupils and closes in July.

The decision was announced in March, following a consultation that ran for six weeks and received four hundred and eleven responses, of which four hundred and nine opposed closure.

The report to committee describes the consultation as "robust."

The arithmetic

There is no villain here and Bryn Lewis, who has been the head and, since 2019, the only teacher, has spent four months explaining this to people who want there to be one.

Eleven pupils. Capacity for sixty-four. Cost per pupil of about fourteen thousand against a county average of five and a half. A building from 1878 with a roof that has been on the capital risk register since 2016 and a quotation of two hundred and ninety thousand.

There are nine surplus places in the county for every occupied one in this school.

Bryn has run those numbers himself, more than once, hoping to find that they were wrong, and they are not wrong, and this is the part he cannot say at a public meeting.

What he can say

That the nearest alternative is fourteen miles.

That for four of the eleven that means a bus journey of fifty minutes each way, which is eight hours a week, which is a school day.

That two of the eleven have been at this school since they were four and one of those two does not do well with change, and that this is in a file, and that files travel but the fourteen years of Bryn knowing exactly which morning is going to be difficult and why do not.

The eleven

Cadi, 11. Ifan, 11. Both leave for secondary in September anyway and are, Bryn thinks, going to be fine, and are also the two most upset, which he did not predict and has stopped trying to understand.

Nia, 10. Twm, 10. Efa, 9.

Gruff, 8, who arrived in 2023 speaking no Welsh and now argues in it.

Lowri, 7. Mabli, 7. Rhys, 6.

Jac, 5.

And Seren, 4, who started in September, whose parents knew about the consultation and enrolled her anyway, and whose father said to Bryn at the gate in October: "Ten months is ten months."

The bell

There is a bell. It is on the wall by the door, it is dated 1878, and it is rung by hand.

It has been rung at 09:00 and 15:15 every school day for a hundred and forty-seven years, except for a period in 1941 when ringing bells was prohibited.

The children ring it. There is a rota. Being on the rota is, in the internal economy of Ysgol Pen-y-Waun, the single most valuable thing there is, and Bryn has watched the rota do more for the behaviour of certain children than any policy he was ever sent on a course about.

What Bryn found in April

He was clearing the office — there is a great deal of clearing; a hundred and forty-seven years of a school produces an amount of paper that has to be seen — and he found the 2021 capital planning schedule.

It lists Pen-y-Waun under a heading. The heading is Estate rationalisation — sites for disposal, 2024–2027.

Dated November 2021.

The consultation ran in January 2025.

On what that means

Bryn has thought about this for three months and has arrived somewhere he does not enjoy.

It does not mean the decision was wrong. The numbers were the same in 2021 as in 2025; if anything they were slightly better.

It means the consultation was not a decision point. It was a procedural requirement discharged after the fact, and the four hundred and nine responses opposing closure were read, and logged, and appended, and could not have changed anything, and the people who wrote them did not know that.

Menna Prichard, who is seventy-eight and who attended this school and whose grandchildren attend it, spent a fortnight on hers. She got someone to type it. It runs to nine pages.

Bryn has not told her.

He has drafted the letter four times. He gets to the part where he has to explain what November 2021 means and he stops, because there is no version of that paragraph that does not take something away from her that she is going to need in July.

July

The last day is the eighteenth.

There will be a service. The county has offered a representative; the governors have declined, politely, in writing, in a letter that Bryn helped draft and is quietly proud of.

The bell is going to the National Museum, which was Cadi's idea, put in writing by Cadi, aged eleven, to an address she found herself.

The museum said yes in nine days.

The rota

The rota for the last week is up on the wall.

Bryn did it in April and then changed it in May and then changed it again, because there are eleven children and five school days and two ringings a day, which is ten, which does not go.

He has thought about this more than he has thought about his own next job.

In the end he has put two children on the last bell together. Seren, who is four and has been here ten months, and Cadi, who is eleven and has been here seven years and who wrote to a museum.

Neither of them knows yet.

He is going to tell them on the Monday, and then he is going to have to leave the room.