ALL parents surely want their children to be able to work in a calm environment at school so they have the best chance of learning as well as they can.

Teachers also need to be sure of working in that kind of atmosphere so that they can deliver their best work.

No one wants to see a child excluded from class. But having explored every other option for dealing with continually disruptive pupils, what else is a headteacher supposed to do?

If one child is ruining the learning environment for 29 other pupils, there can be no alternative but to remove him or her from the classroom, and eventually, if the problem can't be solved, from the school. But we all know it's never as straightforward a process as that. There must be a lot of agonising and soul-searching that goes on in a headteacher's office before a decision is taken to give up on trying to teach a pupil as part of the school community.

There are claims that the rocketing numbers of exclusions, mirrored in Bolton, have some link to the surge in knife crimes. There can be hundreds of reasons why a child is difficult in the classroom, and as the head of Ofsted, Amanda Spielman said, it is the problems which lead to a pupil’s expulsion ­— rather than the decision to exclude them ­— which is more likely to explain later violence. Teachers do a sterling job in educating pupils in difficult circumstances and we don't believe they can be blamed for the rise in knife crime.