NUISANCE families who struggle to control their children will be given parenting lessons in a pioneering new scheme designed to curb anti-social behaviour.

Families will be moved out of their homes and into a residential unit where they will be given basic instruction, such as being woken each weekday morning and told to take their children to school.

They will also be ordered to be at home by 11pm.

The unit will be regularly checked, they will be taught how to cook and look after their children, and they will be offered anger management lessons.

By doing this, town hall chiefs hope to break the cycle of tenants moving from one area to another, taking trouble with them.

About 150 families will be tar-

geted -- 52 of which are currently at critical risk of eviction.

Council bosses believe evicting troublesome families only moves the problem on, leading their new neighbours to make fresh complaints of noise, out-of-control children and aggressive behaviour.

Instead they want to concentrate on tough enforcement measures which change the attitudes of anti-social people. Around 60 families would be dealt with each year.

It would be a carbon copy of the highly-successful Dundee Families Project (DFP), a scheme which Scottish critics claimed to be "insensitive".

But the DFP has been hailed by the Government as a model for tackling anti-social behaviour. It claims to have helped 80 families rebuild their lives since February 1997.

Gill Hughes, Bolton's anti-social behaviour co-ordinator, said: "We will be walking the families through life and breaking a vicious circle where each generation of children pick-up bad habits from their parents."

A report called "Establishing a Bolton Families Project" was expected to be approved at a meeting of the council's executive today.

It says it will cost £600,000 to build a residential unit, but that money will be saved by not having to pay the legal costs associated with eviction.

The most troublesome families would be placed in self-contained flats within the unit. Support would be on hand 24 hours a day. They would be rehoused only when they could show they are able to live successfully in the community.

Those who pose less of a problem would be housed in flats across the borough, each receiving help but on a less intensive basis.

Christopher Holmes, director of NCH Scotland, which runs the scheme in Dundee, said: "Our project shows that families whose anti-social behaviour causes misery to their neighbours can be helped to change."

"At the moment, troublesome families are evicted and they often end up in poor quality private accommodation. The anti-social behaviour continues, the landlord throws them out and they go back to square one.

In Dundee, anger management and parenting skills are taught and classes are organised for cookery and domestic budgeting. Alcohol and drugs counselling is made available.

The DFP, according to a report, was found to have helped most of the families it worked with and prevented them from being evicted, while reducing the number of neighbour disputes.

Bolton hopes to have a success rate of at least 70 per cent.

"Eviction is not the answer -- it only moves the problem on and causes severe problems for the children involved."