SIXTH form students made ruthless decisions to close care homes, libraries and crèches when they played at being councillors for the day.

The initiative, organised by the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), saw students from five sixth forms across the North-East descend on Carmel College in Darlington to act as councillors for the fictional borough of Lyechester.

The students were asked to make £5m of savings from their council’s annual budget but a variety of challenges, or ‘bombshells’, were thrown at them throughout the afternoon.

This meant they had to make an extra £500,000 of cuts before presenting their revised budget to a panel of ‘directors’ for approval.

Cuts in the Carmel College group’s budget included closing a loss-making factory unit, reverting to cheaper, frozen, meals on wheels for the elderly and closing a council-run crèche facility.

Their justification was that they hoped the private sector could step in to fill holes left by council services and that they would use a £2m government grant to help those made redundant back into employment.

Carmel College student James Vayro, 17, said the exercise had given his group a greater sympathy for the challenges faced by councils during the recession.

He said: “We have got a better insight into the running of a council and how difficult it is to make these decisions.

“It is a balancing act between how to save money, but keep what people need or want.”

Sophie Jackson, a 16-year-old student at St Anthony’s Catholic Academy in Sunderland, said: “They (councils) get a lot of stick but they have to do it; they have to cut money back from somewhere.”

Fellow St Anthony’s student Lydia Ellison, 16, added: “It has been a challenge, but in a good way.”

George Clark, the games leader for the CIPFA, said the idea of the event was to introduce students to an element of public finance that they would not normally be exposed to through the educational curriculum.

He said: “It gives them an insight into the public sector that they just don’t see and it gives them all sorts of skills such as working as a team and problem solving.”

Debbie Cox, a Carmel College business studies teacher, said the event had been huge success.

She added: “It was a bit of an unknown for us, but once we told about it, it sounded really good and it has proved to be really good.”