DESPITE one parent's complaint that an East Lancashire school's new "isolation room" for unruly pupils is harsh, most others, we think, will welcome the tactic - and the disclosure that other schools are doing the same.

For bad discipline in schools is a canker that only gets worse if it is not stamped out.

At best, the education of the keen-to-learn majority suffers when lessons are disturbed by the troublesome few.

At worst, as was seen with the case of the now-notorious Ridings School in Halifax, when disruption runs rife, the whole place can descend into the sort of out-of-control "sink school" confusion that wrecks the hopes and opportunities of whole classes of children.

Sensible parents want none of that for their children and will approve of such steps as the "isolation room" that has been set up at Darwen Vale High. For, nowadays, staff have few practical and effective courses of action to call upon to both punish and deter the disorderly.

Proof of this is shown in the soaring numbers of exclusions from schools and in the recent rash of industrial action threats by angry teachers seeking to have the bad apples permanently removed from the barrel.

But if this development stems from the understandable frustration and desperation felt by many teachers over the maintenance of school discipline, barring bad pupils, either temporarily or permanently, only relocates problem instead of curing it.

In short, exclusion simply shoves troublesome children into the community where they may not only receive no tuition, but, as since many are left unsupervised, they may also be granted the dubious opportunity to cause or get into more trouble.

The "isolation room," then, is an alternative to the questionable response of suspension and works in the interest of the pupil concerned, his or her classmates, the school itself, education generally and the whole community.

The fact that, during the one or two days that they are there, its inhabitants find themselves literally segregated from the rest - being under full supervision all the time, made to do work, and prevented from mixing with others at any time - is, of course, a fitting response towards the unruly.

For does it not tell them that they have made themselves outcasts and that they must cease?

It would seem to us that the isolation room provides lessons that have been long overdue.

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