A HAMPSHIRE-based private school has failed in its bid to bring back smacking.

The King's School, which operates a senior school in Allington Lane, Fair Oak, was one of four independent Christian schools where teachers and parents claimed that the ban on corporal punishment infringed their human rights.

They had proposed that boys could be disciplined by being hit across the backside with a thin, broad, flat paddle. Girls would have been hit with a strap on the hand and then the child comforted by a member of staff and encouraged to pray.

At a hearing before five law lords in December they argued that their schools were set up specifically to provide a Christian education based on Biblical observance - and this meant the use of corporal punishment as part of their beliefs.

But the plea by King's, the Christian Fellowship School at Edge Hill, Liverpool, Bradford Christian School at Idle, Bradford, and Cornerstone School at Epsom, was dismissed by Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead - backed by the other law lords.

Steve Haines, a trustee of the Hampshire Christian Education Trust which runs The King's School, told the Daily Echo: "We are disappointed with the outcome but until I have seen the actual judgement I would not like to comment any further."

Lord Nicholls said Parliament was bound to respect the claimants' beliefs - which involved "inflicting physical violence on children in an institutional setting" - but was entitled to decide that manifestation of those beliefs in practice was not in the best interests of children.

Both the High Court and the Court of Appeal have already thrown out the argument that the 1996 Education Act, which prohibits smacking, infringes the parents' and teachers' religious freedoms and right to an education of their choice.

Since 1987 school teachers in state or publicly-funded schools had no right to smack pupils and this was extended to all types of schools in 1998.