by Tim Wyatt, The Critical Friend
The Church in Wales is at loggerheads with Pembrokeshire County Council after the local authority began moves to strip three local church schools of their religious status.
Just as is common in England, a minority of state schools in Wales also have longstanding affiliation with the Church in Wales and an ongoing Christian ethos baked in. Cilgerran Primary School, in a village on the Pembrokeshire coast in south Wales, is one such school. Opened in 1845, the Welsh-speaking school overlooks St Llawddog’s in the centre of the village.
The current story began back in 2025 during a review of school provision by the council. Like much of the UK, Pembrokeshire is seeing pupil numbers fall (a consequence of falling birthrates in general) and concluded there were too many school places in the region. The council decided to pursue closing down Cilgerran as a church school before re-opening it on the same site as what is known as a ‘community school’ — i.e. an ordinary state school with no religious affiliation or ethos.
The reason for doing this becomes clearer when you read the responses from the council to a statutory consultation it had to hold late last year. While the council states that nothing else would change about Cilgerran other than its church status, the long-term plan appears to be to clear the way for merging or federating the school with other schools. And for that to happen, first Cilgerran has to lose its church status (known in the jargon as being Voluntary Controlled or VC) in order for it to be merged with other nearby non-church schools down the line. One line in the report states:
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