Short of blowing the place up it’s hard to think of anything that children might do these days that would result in their expulsion from school. Turning up for class stoned or dealing drugs to vulnerable fellow students within school grounds is not enough to merit the order of the boot.

Last week the Department of Education published new guidelines on substance abuse in schools and explicitly opposed the expulsion of students found to be in possession of drugs.

We already know from a disturbing case highlighted at the TUI conference earlier this year that bringing weapons to school and attacking teachers and fellow pupils is not a guaranteed expulsion offence either.

In that incident a consistently disruptive teenager brought a knife to school, assaulted a teacher and stabbed a fellow pupil with a pen. His expulsion was overturned by the education department following an appeal by his parents.

That case neatly encapsulates the problems faced by the department as well as individual schools and teachers when dealing with dangerous or disruptive pupils. If parents do get involved it is usually to consult lawyers and invoke technicalities, rather than address the reasons why their youngsters were punished in the first place.

A few months ago a survey of more than 1,000 secondary teachers found that 70% of them had classes seriously disrupted by unruly pupils within the previous week. That figure suggests that almost every school in the country is having trouble with ill-disciplined children and that practically every teacher has to deal with it on a regular basis.

As one teacher remarked in the course of that survey: “They spend their time playing Grand Theft Auto on their Playstations, and I have to try to keep their attention with a blackboard and a piece of chalk.”

The difficulties for the teachers, school authorities, and even the department in devising ways of addressing this behaviour have been well documented. But far too little attention is paid to the rights of the other pupils in the disrupted classrooms. They are the real victims of these often foul-mouthed, aggressive and insolent students.

The stated reason for the education department’s opposition to a policy of expulsion for drug abuse is that such a step “can have the effect of alienating a student from mainstream sources of help and may result in this student becoming more involved in the culture of drug abuse”.

Indeed it might. But in the short term it would also have the effect of alienating a student peddling drugs from convenient sources of demand and keeping other pupils free of a profoundly unhealthy influence and role model.

At the very least, the right to expel a drug-using pupil ought to be left to the discretion of the individual schools, without any explicit disapproval from the education department clouding their decisions. In the absence of that pressure schools would be free to make a distinction between those youngsters in underprivileged areas for whom the drug culture is a genuine threat, and the pampered private school pupils dabbling in hash for extra pocket money.

This debate needs to consider those children who have to battle against the odds to get an education. Finian McGrath, the Independent TD who was once an inner-city primary school teacher, has spoken of the admirable resolve of those former pupils who had to step over strung-out junkies and avoid dealers in the stairwells of their apartment blocks as they made their way to class.

These are the kids who need all the encouragement and leeway the schools can give. Instead, the department has issued a blanket ban on the expulsion of drug-abusing students. This decision suggests it is looking over its shoulder at those indulged and precocious youngsters for whom drugs are an illicit thrill rather than a grim way of life and who can count on well-heeled and litigious parents running to lawyers at the first hint of censure.

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