THE pressure mounting on Home Secretary David Blunkett to allow children staying at asylum seeker centres to attend local schools demonstrates, once again, how precariously principle and practicality are balanced.

In principle, it's hard to disagree that allowing children to go to local schools provides the best chance to integrate them in their new communities.

In principle, it's easy to understand those who fear it will be detrimental for them to be taught within the centres.

But, in practice, it's difficult to see how the children already at local schools won't be adversely affected by the new intake, or how the newcomers will be provided for, and what curriculum they'll follow.

Save the Children charity director general Mike Aaronson says education should be "universally available".

Few would argue with that, but suggesting that teaching such children outside the mainstream "is a dangerous and unprecedented attack on that principle" is to be disputed.

So far as Throckmorton's concerned, though, it's academic.

Mid-Worcestershire MP Peter Luff says today's anticipated Parliamentary challenge to Mr Blunkett over education is "distracting attention from the core issue". He's right.

He won't discuss the detail of centres as "they're wrong in principle. The battle... is to have smaller centres in urban areas". He's right again.

That's the issue to debate, not the location of classrooms.

Unless it happens, who learns what - and where - might one day look trivial alongside the host of other social problems that will surface from these camps.