The New South Wales government this month announced that the state’s 1, 000 private schools would no longer be permitted to cane recalcitrant children. Instead, it said, isolation rooms could be used.

State education minister John Aquilina warned that private schools would face deregistration if they continued to use corporal punishment. For most schools, registration provides access to federal and state money which in the case of Catholic parochial schools often amounts to almost their entire annual incomes.

Under the Labour government’s “good discipline and effective learning policy”, badly behaved children may be sent to a time-out or isolation room that will be built by the government. Other options include supervised detention classes and loss of privileges. reprimands or other “forms of correction approved by the minister”, including students performing any reasonable or safe work or service for the school, can also be used.

Mr Aquilina, a former teacher, said Australia was one of only three industrialised nations to allow corporal punishment. He said it was illegal to use corporal punishment in prisons yet Australians thought nothing of applying it to students in schools.

He said: “We have to send out a firm signal that as far as corporal punishment is concerned it has no place in the school environment.”

But while the decision was welcomed by the Independent Education Union, which represents 17,000 teachers in New South Wales non-government schools, a group of 40 Christian education schools said the ban could not be enforced.

The Reverend Robert Frisken, president of the association representing the group, told journalists he felt “ambushed” by the decision and could not ensure that his schools would adopt the policy.

Mr Frisken said: “God has assured us that corporal punishment is beneficial to the individual. Each of the schools is autonomous and it is impossible for me to guarantee that each would not keep using it in some form.”