An increase in the number of pupils being excluded from Scottish schools for serious behavioural problems, from vandalism and verbal abuse to assaults and threats of sexual �violence, has become a statistical hardy annual.

An increase in the number of pupils being excluded from Scottish schools for serious behavioural problems, from vandalism and verbal abuse to assaults and threats of sexual violence, has become a statistical hardy annual. Against this background, the reduction of 15.8% in the number excluded from Glasgow schools last year, plus a 58% drop in those permanently expelled, is remarkable. The city has traditionally topped the tables for the proportion of pupils excluded, a statistic related to high levels of deprivation. The sudden turnaround, therefore, bears closer scrutiny.

Education officials in Glasgow attribute it to a new strategy in which every school has a support programme for disruptive pupils, which deals with underlying problems of attitude and behaviour before they escalate to the point where exclusion is necessary. If this is succeeding in teaching children to control their anger and understand how their behaviour affects other people, it is cause for congratulation because it is likely to lead to successful engagement with learning. However, the Educational Institute of Scotland, the largest teachers' union, believes the reduction in exclusions may be due more to pressure on schools not to use exclusion as a sanction than to the provision of new support facilities to change pupil behaviour.

It is likely that both suggestions are correct. The number of pupils excluded from Scottish schools dropped under a previous system which set targets for keeping the numbers down. When this was scrapped in the year 2003-4, there was an immediate 7% jump in the number of exclusions. In the years since then, that number has followed an apparently inexorable upwards trajectory, with teachers arguing that temporary suspension can be an effective sanction, resulting in the need for fewer permanent expulsions. It is clear from the accounts of teachers at the EIS conference in June that serious incidents, including assaults, are taking place in schools across Scotland and that there is growing frustration on the part of teachers that the education authorities are not sufficiently robust in tackling the problem.

The rising tide of violence in schools must be turned.The majority of children want to do their best, but in a classroom that is a permanent battleground between disruptive pupils and teachers worn down by unacceptable levels of rudeness and aggression, even those who are keen to learn will become disaffected. The Glasgow figures revealed today by The Herald do suggest that a concerted policy to deal with the underlying causes of unacceptable behaviour, which includes specialist centres for the most difficult cases, is effective.

Exclusion must remain as the ultimate sanction against school pupils whose behaviour is persistently disruptive or a danger to pupils or teachers. Simply removing them from the register and shunting them off to another school, however, is a solution more conducive to increasing their sense of alienation than tackling it, and therefore likely to increase rather than reduce the bad behaviour. Tackling the root causes of problem behaviour is the long-term answer to ejecting unacceptable levels of disobedience, aggression and violence from the classroom, and it needs to be implemented at the earliest signs of trouble.