SENIOR Monmouthshire councillors formally pulled the plug on unpopular proposals to change schools’ catchment areas at a meeting this week.

The Argus previously reported the authority’s cabinet member for children and young people Cllr Liz Hacket Pain had indicated nine boundary changes would not go ahead after a consultation showed some of them to be unpopular. The consultation ended in January.

Cllr Hacket Pain said parents, some of whom she had met during the consultation, “basically wanted things to stay the same”.

She defended the need for the consultation, which was the first Monmouthshire council had undertaken since local government reorganisation and its foundation in 1996, but said she was unaware of how much it had cost.

She said: “We need to be able to look at areas when we are designing secondary schools and we need to look at changes in our county.”

The catchment areas are only used when schools are oversubscribed to decide which pupils should be admitted.

The only changes that will be adopted will be to the council’s policy on twins and to establish formal catchment areas for its Welsh medium schools, Caldicot’s Ysgol Y Ffin and Abergavenny’s Ysgol Gymraeg Y Fenni.

Under the change on twins, if they are both applicants to a school and one would have been rejected because of limits on how many pupils could be accepted, both will now be admitted.

In documents seen by the cabinet, the opposition to the mooted changes was made clear.

They revealed of the 317 parents who responded to the plan to change Archbishop Rowan Williams Primary School’s feeder secondary school from Caldicot School to Chepstow School, 296 were opposed.

And 75 of the 92 respondents were against a proposal to a change that would have seen secondary school pupils in Usk, Llangybi, Tredunnock and Llanhennock wholly served by Monmouth Comprehensive School’s catchment area. They currently have the option to go to Newport council's Caerleon Comprehensive School.

The council had also drawn up plans to change the county’s oversubscription criteria in the consultation. It had been proposed children who live within a school’s catchment area would be given priority over children who live outside it but who have older siblings already there.

But that was also unpopular with parents. Of 532 parents who responded to the council’s consultation on the criteria, 321 disagreed with the proposals, 94 were in favour, 103 didn’t know and 14 did not answer.

In the same files, the authority’s acting access unit manager Matthew Jones said council officers are concerned that the poor response questioned “whether parents fully understand the impact of the proposals” put to them.