PARENTS and headteachers have expressed their shock and disbelief at radical proposals to reshape primary education in Bromyard.

Chloe Evans, headteacher at Pencombe CE, said she was "shocked and disappointed" at the proposals put forward in Herefordshire Council's education review.

She said the draft plans, which include closing both Pencombe and Bredenbury primaries and amalgamating the two into a new school on the Bredenbury site, were "not radical, but savage."

She continued: "The scale of this has come as a total shock, and it will cause such huge distress and disruption to what is, in many schools, a very high standard of education."

The review aims to streamline the county's education capacity in light of declining pupil numbers. The merged school would see 56 capacity Pencombe and 70 capacity Bredenbury combined into a single 105 capacity facility.

However Mrs Evans pointed out that Pencombe routinely operated at its full capacity.

"I know we are a small school, but the point is that we do not have any spaces," she said. "We recognise that there needs to be some change, and it comes as no surprise for a school of this size to be under some review, but the speed and force of this has come as a real shock."

Tim Waight, chair of governors at Bredenbury, said schools throughout the cluster would work together to minimise the damage.

"Closing a school in a rural community is an important decision, and I am fundamentally against it," he said. "If you close a school in a village you only get one chance. They don't come back."

Brockhampton headteacher Lindsey Taylor said plans to amalgamate the school with Whitbourne CE into a new 210 pupil school at a yet to be confirmed Whitbourne site were devastating.

"The staff are shocked, parents are up in arms and the children are very upset," she said. "We are certainly going to fight this all the way.

"It is our location that makes us vulnerable. We don't have our own community on the doorstep, yet we still have more than 150 pupils. If parents had wanted to send their children to Whitbourne they would have gone there in the first place."

Susie Gibbs, chairman of the Brockhampton PTA, said parents had started a petition to fight the merger.

"There is a sense of disbelief that they are suggesting closing our flourishing school," she said. "The children love going to the school, and it would cause a great deal of upheaval for them."