The view from Roger Williams’s room is enviable. The office of Ceredigion’s director of education looks out over the waves crashing on Aberystwyth’s seafront. However, the director of Wales’s smallest education authority has had little time to admire that magnificent seascape lately. Tough challenges have had to be faced in this western outpost because the education authority has the highest primary school costs in Wales - 30 per cent above average - and the largest number of small schools.

Despite impressive academic results, political pressures demand that savings be made. But how can education be restructured without jeopardising standards and forcing school closures that would destroy small communities?

To avoid closures - only one school has been closed since Ceredigion was created in 1996 - it is proposed to cluster primaries under one management team, and create families of schools by grouping primaries with their local secondary.

By 2003, each secondary should have formed a family with the primaries in its catchment area. By 2005, a third of schools are to be reorganised to form multi-site community learning centres under a single management team. With such upheaval in the offing, it is no surprise that Mr Williams describes as “a major step backwards” recent legislation that insisted on each school having its own governing body. Individual governing bodies focused on the small picture could be highly inconvenient at such a time.

Mr Williams emphasises that the reorganisation is driven by cost, not quality concerns: “The smallest secondary school performs well even with such small numbers. I have been challenging the district auditor’s assertion that small sixth forms do not perform well, as our experience does not bear this out.

“It is difficult to argue the case for closing small schools on education grounds. Estyn (the Welsh schools inspectorate) finds that small schools perform as well as the people who are running them.” Big changes are also planned for school managers, teachers and pupils. Management consultants are working with two pilot schools on a programme of “structured coaching” for staff that promises to involve “lots of soul searching”, says Mr Williams.

Nor will pupils be missed out. Ceredigion is developing thinking skills programmes in key stages 1,2 and 3, working alongside King’s College, London, and Professor Carol McGuinness of Queen’s University, Belfast (see story below).

The authority’s education plan says that by 2005 all teachers should be aware of the learning preferences of their students and use a range of teaching styles appropriate to them. Roger Williams explains: “A lot has been learnt about how people learn. We feel that we need to ensure that the profession in the county become experts in learning. The trick is accepting that in a class of 25 pupils there are going to be children with many different learning styles. Our lessons have to appeal to all these individuals.”

There appears to be confidence that now, post-Devolution, is a good time to tackle these big issues, with education now in the hands of the Welsh Assembly, rather than faraway Westminster.

Mr Williams says that there has been a “better feeling of belonging” since Devolution and he praises the vision of Jane Davidson, the education minister, and her grasp of the issues facing education in Wales.

Ceredigion is a bilingual authority, believing in embracing Welsh culture without being backward-looking. Indeed, it would be impossible to stay still as the authority is being flooded with incomers.

Mr Williams says: “There is an increasing pattern of the indigenous population leaving and the migration of people from England. Young people like the bright lights. The biggest magnet at present is Cardiff. “Over the past few years about 1,200 people a year have migrated to the county. That’s big stuff when you have a population of 70,000.”

But the 21st-century English invaders are blending in, sending their children to local schools, where they are taught in Welsh. And their parents are starting to learn Welsh too.

Schools are encouraged to look outward through the Roots and Wings project. This scheme, run with Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire, supports schools as they team up with counterparts in Tuscany and Vejle in Denmark. The idea is that pupils explore their own roots while learning about other cultures.

The project seems to sum up the ethos of the authority, and if the key challenges facing Roger Williams are successfully negotiated, Ceredigion - itself firmly rooted in Welsh culture as it stretches its wings - may find itself at the Celtic cutting edge.