THE decision to order a school to tear down its temporary classrooms is a mistake.

Pupils will be the ones to suffer after councillors decided that they would no longer tolerate the structure on green belt land.

But their desire to make a stand will lose a lot of good faith with parents whose children may have nowhere to take lessons.

This situation could have been avoided if councillors had thought a little harder.

The school's annual intake is due to drop in 2002, which would have been the right time to remove the classrooms.

The classrooms have been on the land since the 1970s so was it too much to allow the school to have them there for one more year?

This is going to cause a nightmare for staff who still have no idea where they are going to put the pupils when they come back after the summer holiday.

Little Kingshill Combined School has been the pride of its community after getting a good Ofsted and winning a school achievement award.

But how can anyone expect them to keep up the standards when they may end up having to teach children in the playground?

You cannot expect pupils to be able to concentrate on their studies with that amount of disruption.

One other solution may be to jam more children into other classrooms but that is not the way any school would wish to move forward.

It is a good principle to make a stand on the green belt, but it shouldn't be at the expense of pupils' education, especially when the problem would have resolved itself in just 12 month's time.