Wendy Berliner: Only teachers can know the reality of the classroom

Too much power lies with those who know nothing of classroom realities

Two teenage boys are told by a teacher to stop throwing stones at the gym's windows. A perfectly sensible request. They are acting in a way that any parent should have forbidden their children from doing since infancy. End of story. Except it's not the end of this story. The boys telephone the teacher at home and leave death threats on his answerphone. One says he is going to die in five days. Another says he is going to be stabbed in the back of the head.

More than 40 anonymous messages are left causing extreme distress to the teacher and his family. The boys are identified by the police and reprimanded. They are then excluded from school. But their parents appeal to an independent tribunal – an unnamed trio of volunteers drawn from "lay members and education experts". These people hear the evidence of the boys, the parents and the school and they take the side of the boys and reinstate them. They went back to school last Monday.

The rest is part of a major political row. Teachers at Glyn Technology School in Epsom, Surrey, are refusing to teach them; the Education Secretary, Estelle Morris, is so furious that she makes an unprecedented intervention, making it clear to the education authority that she wants the boys taught elsewhere. Meanwhile, the teacher, Steve Taverner, 54, who was so outrageously threatened, is suffering from stress, away from school, and unable to contemplate going back to work if the boys, aged 15 and 16, are still attending the school.

And the worst thing about this sorry saga? It is, apart from Ms Morris's unexpected involvement, an all-too-familiar tale. For no matter how appalling the behaviour of pupils, independent appeals panels – set up to hear parents' objection to exclusions – keep ordering children's reinstatement. And without reform of the appeals process, it is only a matter of time before such an incident happens to another teacher.

During 2000-01 there were 9,210 permanent exclusions from schools in England. Of 983 appeals heard, nearly one-third of them overturned decisions made by the school involved. Usually, these cases are quietly settled with the reinstated pupils being taught by a supply teacher separately from everyone else, as happened to these two boys when they returned to school on Monday.

It was the extreme nature of these two boys' offences that has caused such outrage, and put the spotlight on how we deal with disruptive pupils. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers, the moderate teacher union representing Steve Taverner, carried out ballots in 33 schools last year in which teachers voted to refuse to teach or supervise particular pupils. Almost without exception they were reacting to the reinstatement of pupils by appeals panels, despite their violent behaviour or threat of violence to teachers or other pupils.

Independent appeals panels were introduced by the Conservatives in 1986, although they now want them abolished. Until then, it was up to headteachers and governors to decide whether to expel a pupil. The appeals panels does allow for natural justice to take its course. People unconnected with the school are able to listen to the evidence presented from each side, weigh it and come to a decision.

But it is their very disconnection from the school that can cause problems. They have little idea as to what it is like to teach in the school. Many outsiders would fail to understand how three presumably fair-minded and intelligent individuals could have reinstated boys who had threatened to kill one of their teachers. It goes against guidance from the Secretary of State for Education, which says that exclusions for violence or threatened violence should not normally be overturned.

Schools do not exclude pupils lightly. An excluded pupil often has a history of difficult behaviour, and the overturning of a permanent exclusion on appeal can be disastrous both for the morale of teaching staff in a school, and the message it conveys to other pupils about bad behaviour.

All young people constantly assess just how much they can get away with, and it's the penalties they might face if they do step over the line that affect whether their behaviour is anti-social or not. In this particular case the mother of one of the boys, Sue Aldred, confirmed that her son did make calls and that he wrote to apologise to the teacher. She says he isn't a "yob" and has now "served his time" by missing five months of education. She wants him back at the school. No decision has yet been made on the future of the boys, and it won't be for a few more days. In the meantime, they will receive personal tuition, but from whom and where is to be decided.

What this case did reveal is the extent to which the system of dealing with disruptive pupils needs reform and, in particular, how the playing field needs to be levelled if the appeals tribunals are to continue. While the parents are entitled to legal representation at tribunals – and in this case they were backed by a specialist organisation, Community Empowerment – the head and the school governors are not. Mr Taverner has said that he was on trial during the appeal, not the boys. He is not the first teacher to say it.

Not all pupils should have the right to appeal if they are excluded. Some offences, if freely admitted or proved beyond reasonable doubt, are so serious that they should carry mandatory permanent exclusion. Making 44 threatening phone calls including one in which you threaten to stab a teacher in the back of the head, should fall into that category. Mrs Aldred says her son is not a dangerous boy and would not have carried out his threat – the threats were just "wind-ups". Mr Taverner, however, would not have known that when he received them.

Cases of this kind should be dealt with quickly, with pupils offered alternative education, whether in a pupil referral unit, or in a school willing to take them and so minimise disruption to their education.

Ms Morris can make a difference, simply by implementing the new powers the Secretary of State was given over appeals panels in the 2002 Education Act. She can, for instance, implement a change to appeal panels, ensuring that a majority of panel members are teachers or former teachers. She could ensure that the panel focuses on key issues, rather than procedural irregularities, which are used to overturn exclusions. It should be a statutory requirement for appeals panels to balance the interests of the excluded pupil against the interests of the whole school community but, again, this has yet to be implemented. And Ms Morris could also fast-track the regulations that implement these changes, rather than waiting until January, when they are due to be put into practice.

On Friday when the Glyn Technology School case was dominating the headlines, a middle- aged drunk who had threatened to rip the throat out of a flight attendant on a plane travelling between Chicago and Glasgow was jailed for three months in Scotland. The judge said his behaviour was appalling. No one is advocating the jailing of boys who make death threats in foolish phone calls to a teacher. But their behaviour is appalling and should be taken seriously. The natural consequences should be that they have forfeited their right to be educated in the school of their parents' choice. As Estelle Morris, herself a former teacher, put it at the Labour Party conference: "One child threatening or abusing one teacher in one of our schools is one too many."