Have lessons been learned?

As he eyes closely the current proposals to close down or amalgamate a raft of rural schools in Shropshire, David Smith might be excused for feeling a sense of deja vu.David, a grandfather from Myddle, has been here before, and can lay claim to the benefit of hindsight.

Just over 22 years ago, in December 1985, he was among a group of parents opposing plans to shut the school his son attended at the time, The Corbet School in Baschurch.

Under the then 'forward-thinking' banner "Towards 2000", a county council working party was proposing to close eight secondary schools. The bombshell triggered one of the biggest and most sustained school protest campaigns in the county's history.

In strikingly similar circumstances to those which are partly behind proposals to slim down the number of county primary schools, falling birth rates and an assumption of a subsequent drop in pupil-roll numbers were, David recalls, seen as a good reason to consider closing secondary schools.

Again mirroring the current strength of feeling among parents campaigning today to keep their kids' schools open, David was among the "hordes who packed the school hall" to vent their feelings.

In Baschurch, a year-long campaign to save The Corbet School was launched, and eventually it was saved. Today, Corbet School is a thriving seat of learning - one of the top performing in the county, in fact - and families move to the area so their children can attend.

A recent Ofsted report noted that numbers had increased by more than 140 pupils over the previous five years.

But the "what-ifs" remain. Today David is among the campaigners trying to save Myddle Primary School, but he believes lessons learned from the victorious campaign to save the Corbet two decades ago should not be forgotten.

"We had children at the school and faced the prospect of the school being closed due to the assumption by Shropshire County Council that the falling birth rate in the school's catchment area would result in the school not being able to meet its intake requirement.

"The parents, governors and the PTA fought a campaign to keep the school open and won. The fact is the council got it wrong - their 'assumption' on falling intake numbers was wrong."

It was an assumption, as David puts it, that would have seen the likes of his son having to travel miles to the next nearest school.

Furthermore, this school closure would have struck at the heart of the community, ripping out a vital hub of rural life and deterring people from wanting to live there in the future.

That particular future, of course, is now. Today, David is among the campaigners trying to stop the axe falling on Myddle Primary, one of the feeder schools for Corbet and the school his granddaughter hopes to go to.

A generation on from the Corbet campaign, David's son Gary, who attended the spared school with younger brother Darren, has moved back to the area and is hoping that his own daughter Lucy, 4, will attend Myddle Primary where she has already started nursery education.

But does the "flawed assumption" that threatened to close the school his sons attended more than 20 years ago remain flawed?

David, manager of the Renault motor dealership in Featherbed Lane, Shrewsbury, poses the question: How can education chiefs 'assume' falling role numbers over the next three years when it is precisely a facility such as a school that attracts new blood?

"My son and his wife came into that community and have a child to go to the school," he says. "There could be 10 other people the same with young children.

"Things can change in three years."

For further examples of new people moving into the area so that their children can go to the local school, he cites plans by a local builder who has two children to build a house in the village and send his kids to Myddle Primary School.

And the case of a family who have put in an offer to buy a village shop and who are now concerned that they may not be able to send their children to Myddle School.

He says: "People move into places such as Baschurch for that reason. If they had acted on the assumption that school intakes would fall and Corbet School had closed 20 years ago, the population of Baschurch may have dropped, their assumptions (of falling school rolls) would have been a reality, and we would never have known.

"And if Myddle School closed, the population would also decline."

David adds: "Myddle School is more than just a school, it's part of the community. It's like the village church and the pub, and we lost our post office years ago.

"It would rip the heart out of the community."

In all this talk of current school closures, amalgamations or whatever the plan ends up including, David has the benefit of hindsight on his side and can point to the fact that in the wake of the Corbet School being saved the surrounding community has gone on to thrive, with many new houses built and more planned.

With this in mind, history should be ignored at our peril, he argues, and the wisdom of previous generations listened to.

Three generations of the Smith family are campaigning against the current school proposals, but David is happy to extend generational hindsight further, saying: "My father always said 'never assume anything because you might get it wrong'."

By Ben Bentley