Madam,

The doors of Coleg Harlech the Welsh adult education college have closed.

The ‘For Sale’ sign is on the gate and that remarkable place has died, without the mass cry of defiant, radical outrage that should have attended it.

The final sale of books from the beautiful library that fuelled the ambition and knowledge of thousands takes place this month and that’s it …. gone.

I feel like a sailor on a quay, watching the Library at Alexandria burn, knowing that something superb has been lost to the world, without understanding its real value.

In 1977 in the introduction to Coleg Harlech – The First 50 Years that remarkable man and Coleg Warden Ieuan Hughes said about the opportunity for future second chance education, “Poverty and a low school leaving age are not the giant killers they were, but they are not impotent…..and the mirage of economic opportunities for the young spread the disease of educational deprivation and provide at least one formidable future for Coleg Harlech.”

I know that since the millennium many good people and organisations and consultants have tried to find a future for CH and struggled essentially to find the vision and the finance to keep the doors open.

Without a belief in a ‘Second Chance’ and the real backing to make it succeed it never could.

Are we less a people than the founders of Coleg Harlech?

Is the need less now than in 1977 for a good education that focuses on “the search for identity and meaning, for qualities of mind and mind of quality”.

Perhaps we are, perhaps we don’t know how to create transformative change, or recognise a gem.

We have though lived recently in a time of huge university expansion, when driven by fees universities have focussed on the numbers.

Our Welsh universities have engaged fully in the competitive educational markets and expanded rapidly.

CH was a tiny island in this sea, without the influence to keep its special purpose in being.

What a place, what a loss to Wales, the world of education and the futures of so many of us late developers.

Who now will walk up the ‘Goat track’ to Harlech on a stunning October morning, believing how lucky they have suddenly become.

In this loss to CH what has happened to its beliefs, its donated pictures and its valuable books?

Have they truly all been auctioned to the highest bidder?

Shame on us Wales for allowing a loss like this, for not daring to sustain a distinct path for adult education.

In the years of expansion, where was the politician with the force or a Welsh university with the will and purpose to say “this place is safe with us, we will make Cardiff, or Aber, or Bangor the centre of Adult Education in Wales, but CH will be a centre for world class history, or literature or Welsh study. Or maybe even the greatest centre for adult learning, with a theatre attached”.

Who knows, maybe it’s not too late to see an eventual phoenix rise in Harlech to serve our devolved country.

Maybe a vision of what the Coleg Harlech should be would be the start of a debate and a new dream.

Yes there is the accommodation question, yes there are capital and revenue costs, and yes there are problems.

With vision and purpose any of these, as the founders knew could be overcome.

Universities you are now businesses, can’t you see an opportunity?

Welsh Government, MPs, Assembly Members, councillors, do you really not know what you are losing, can you really not deliver a future?

I see that (despite their own challenges) the Scots have kept New Battle Abbey and Ruskin is of course still there in Oxford.

Yours etc,

Peter Evans, The Mill House, Llangwm, Usk.

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