WELL done, headmaster Harry Sharples who banned 11-year-old pupil Joshua Holmes from going on end-of-term school trips after he had a 'David Beckham' Mohican-style haircut.

For while I agree that the lad's appearance -- mimicking that of the immature silly-beggar England captain -- may in no way reflect his behaviour, the whole business amounts to something else.

Namely, that the kid looks a mess and Mr Sharples, head of St Gabriel's Primary School in Blackburn, is not prepared to have his school shown up by him in public, even if his family seem not to mind -- or realise -- that the boy shows up himself and them.

Mr Sharples put it in a nutshell when he said: "It is a case of creating the right impression of the school to people outside it and allowing this pupil to wander around with this haircut would not be conducive to that."

Quite! And if for the sake of his school's reputation and the principles it keeps, a headmaster cannot determine what is proper and what isn't without some pupil or indulgent parent being allowed to gazump them with the aped values of modern soccer-star oafishness, then education might as well ditch what little disciplinary standards it has left.

Yet, we see another school in East Lancashire apparently taking that path -- when in the wake of the Joshua Holmes ban, it was revealed that eight-year-old Danny Howes' Mohawk crop -- fashioned by his father -- elicited no hostile reaction at all from his teachers at St John's Primary School in Great Harwood.

Given that, unlike Mr Sharples, the staff there have not explained their position, we are prevented from reaching a balanced conclusion over where the greater wisdom prevails.

But having previously got a critic on my appearances-do-count view to agree with me when I asked if he would opt to be treated by a brain surgeon with a pony tail rather than one with a short-back-and-sides haircut, I would lay good money that parents with a concern for their children's education and school standards would choose the modestly-strict, 'old-fashioned' St Gabriel's over the evidently easy-going St John's -- and be wise to do so.