SERIAL schoolyard bullies should cop the cane, a Far Northern MP said yesterday.

Member for Tablelands Rosa Lee Long has called for schools to reintroduce corporal punishment, saying schoolyard bullying had reached a level in the Far North that was utterly unacceptable.

"It is the only option left," Ms Lee Long told The Cairns Post.

"Bullies have long since learnt they can get away with it.

"Some students are consistently reprimanded and take no notice – they’re laughing at authority."

Ms Lee Long’s stance comes after fresh complaints about bullying in Far Northern schools, the latest reported to Ms Lee Long involving a 13-year-old girl who was forced to change schools to escape a gang of abusive students.

"She was threatened over nine months to the extent that she went from being a high-achiever to not wanting to go to school… there were threats of gang bashing inside and outside the school," she said yesterday.

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She has called for teachers to inflict the cane for "anything considered a serious breach of school discipline", telling Parliament this week that a small percentage of children needed to "know their boundaries".

Cairns State High School principal Trevor Gordon said the topic should be discussed but personally he disagreed with the idea.

"I have been a principal under the system where we gave the cane and the system where we didn’t and bullying happened under both," Mr Gordon said.

Ms Lee Long described the current system of dealing with problems in schools as a "long drawn-out process that simply allows problems to drag on".

She said suspending students or sending them to another room was not the answer.

"In some ways suspension is simply allowing them to play truant," Ms Lee Long told Parliament.

"It is time for real discipline to return to our schools."

But a spokesperson for Education and Training Minister Rod Welford said there was no intention to reintroduce corporal punishment, which was banned in Queensland in 1994. "There is no evidence to suggest that physically punishing children stops them from bullying other children," the spokesman said.

Mr Welford admitted to The Cairns Post two months ago that anti-bullying campaigns were not working.

Ms Lee Long’s comments come weeks after a report revealed more than 200,000 school pupils in the United States, some as young as three, were punished by beatings last year. The type of corporal punishment typically used was "paddling" or striking a child on the buttocks with a long wooden board.

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