Something is wrong with an education system that allows a 12-year-old boy to attend school for only three hours a day for art, PE, home economics and to play on computers. He is not taught English or maths because his school cannot provide him with a support teacher. Without one he would probably disrupt the other pupils in his class: they would learn nothing and he would learn nothing.
There are no easy solutions for teachers when they are confronted with troublesome children like this, but his part-time existence at school is no solution at all. An education system that fobs off troublemakers with a few hours of so-called schooling a day, rather than educate them, is failing itself, its misfit pupils and, in the end, society. Rightly, the boy’s mother complains: “It is supposed to be an education, but he learns nothing at all.”
If this boy’s predicament was unusual, it would be less worrying. But he is one of many such children. They are supposed to receive a mainstream education but, because they are so difficult to handle, schools cannot cope with them. So, instead of going against the grain of government policy to keep troublemakers in the

mainstream, schools are discovering elaborate ways of minimising the disruption to themselves while at the same time keeping their exclusion figures low.
Common sense dictates that there are two principal options for education policy-makers grappling with persistently disruptive pupils. Either they should be sent to special schools or they should be in ordinary schools reinforced with investment to create special units, special projects and to hire support teachers.
The Scottish Executive has chosen the latter option, but does not seem to be funding it sufficiently for it to work, despite £23m in the excellence fund for schools to set up “alternatives to exclusion”. Money is not the only answer, but it helps. The lack of it, and the government’s target to cut exclusions by one third by 2002, is having the effect of increasing the number of halfway-house children who are being neither educated nor excluded.
The minister must look at the policy again. Unless, of course, Labour intends to modify its mantra “education, education, education” by adding the words “except for children who cause trouble”.