Following the end of this preliminary consultation, the Local Authority together with the National Council for Education and Training and other partner bodies decided to establish, with funding from the Learning Challenge Fund, a Project Management Team to further develop and move forward the options outlined in the review. However, pupils numbers at Vaynor and Penderyn continued to decline rapidly, falling from 363 in January 2003 to 284 in January 2004. This prompted the Local Authority to consider bringing forward a proposal to discontinue Vaynor and Penderyn in advance of any more general proposals identified by the Project Management Team.