DISRUPTIVE pupils are the bane of teachers' lives - and of the majority of well-behaved children who want to learn and progress at school.

Many will sympathise with schools over the lack of effective sanctions they have against indiscipline today but would, nevertheless, baulk at the return of corporal punishment.

However, the question is being asked whether head teachers are too "trigger happy" with the ultimate penalty of expelling problem pupils.

Two reports today highlight the explosion in exclusions.

One, from the Commission for Racial Equality, calls for targets to reduce the number from ethnic minorities who are excluded.

The commission points out that children from Afro-Caribbean backgrounds are four times more likely to be expelled as white children. Another, from the charity the Children's Society, demands that ministers should tackle the rising tide of what it calls "state-sanctioned truancy" as permanent exclusions have shot up by 450 per cent over five years, pitching thousands of pupils out of the classroom.

There are, it seems, a number of factors behind the phenomenon.

But whatever the causes, the upshot is of thousands of trouble-prone, anti-social children being pitched into society with little supervision and, arguably, on to the path to a life of crime.

Ministers must respond to the problem, but so too must schools and parents.

Yet, do we not see one potential solution already at work in some schools in East Lancashire, where the intermediate measure of in-school isolation of the disruptive is employed?

This involves removing them from regular classes, putting them under close and constant teacher supervision and restricting their association with other pupils at all times.

True, it entails high demands on staff resources - a factor to which ministers might respond.

But, nonetheless, is it not better for unruly pupils to be kept in school with their disruptive influence blunted in this way, rather than turfing the uncured troublemakers on to the streets to make more trouble?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.