INTO an already-tumultuous teaching unions' conference season Education Secretary David Blunkett today tosses the announcement that hundreds of new in-school 'sin bins' are to be set up to deal with violent and disruptive pupils -- but not to the rapture of teachers plagued by the unruly.

According to Nigel de Gruchy, head of the NASUWT union at whose conference the move was revealed, teachers want the troublemakers removed and more out-of-school referral units set up to cater for them.

Moving them from one class to another in the same school did not send a sufficiently strong message, he said.

But, as the government pledges to cut by a third the 12,000-plus pupils expelled from schools each year, the rising tide of exclusions that has stemmed from teachers preferring that problem children be placed elsewhere has hardly proved an ideal solution to the difficulty of dealing with ill-discipline.

For, as Mr Blunkett discloses, more than 70 per cent of permanently-excluded pupils end up in the criminal justice system.

In short, the problem is shifted not from one classroom to another, but into the community.

It is also evident that, as the out-of-school referral units receive only two-thirds of the total excluded each year, large numbers are simply being pitched on to the streets to cause and get into trouble. And those who are sent to the referral units are getting little education in any case -- since Mr Blunkett's target of them getting at least 25 hours of lessons a week falls a long way short of the present average of ten hours.

But if teachers are doubtful about the effectiveness of the in-school learning support units, as the 'sin bins' are officially called and of which there are already more than 400 in existence, perhaps the answer is for them to be seen as a truly strong sanction against bad behaviour -- by increasing their sense of ostracism and separation from the school generally.

We are mindful of the 'isolation room' scheme begun in East Lancashire some three years ago as an alternative to suspension and exclusion -- whereby disruptive pupils were placed under full supervision, made to do work and prevented from mixing with other children at any time.

In short, they were 'excluded,' but still in school and still in education.

If the new sin bins match that model, then their effectiveness may be real and teachers' doubts dispelled.

But does not the root of the whole problem, and the quest for acceptable methods that truly combat it, down to teachers no longer having no real sanctions to wield against ill discipline -- and their pupils knowing it?