My Lords, I thank my noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lord Storey for raising this very important issue. We have a great deal of sympathy for what they are saying. The Government are absolutely committed to the protection of children. I understand their concerns: nothing is more important than making sure that our young people are protected and safe from harm. Clearly, children will not easily learn in such circumstances. Assault of children is against the law in whatever setting it takes place. The real issue that we all want to address is how to prevent the unacceptable, and already unlawful, treatment of children. We believe the best way to do this is to support people in their communities to address these issues and uphold the law.
Everyone in society has a responsibility to make sure that children are safe from violence, abuse and neglect. Our job is to enable parents and communities to exercise that responsibility. We must address the culture that allows unlawful treatment of children to be viewed as acceptable or—and which may more often be the issue—that makes people reluctant to report, question or challenge it.
We have a strategy that aims to address this issue in all types of supplementary settings. As my noble friend Lady Walmsley has noted—though not with favour—we are working with a range of interests to develop a voluntary code of practice for supplementary schools. We believe that signing up to the code will mean that providers will establish robust policies in areas such as safeguarding and governance arrangements to help protect children and young people from harm. I hope that she will feel that it is a move in the right direction, even if it is not as much as she would like to see.
The code will send a clear message about the expected standards that all settings should meet. It will enable and empower parents to make informed choices about the provision of supplementary teaching for their children. Through targeted communications, we will inform parents about the code and encourage them to refer to it when selecting suitable provision for their child. Providers who sign up to the code will also naturally want to inform parents about it, to highlight
the good practice they have adopted. We want to give parents the tools to make informed choices about the right provision for their child and to know what to do and whom to go to if they have any concerns.
We will be consulting on the draft code this spring. We will place a copy of the consultation document in the Library and would welcome comments from noble Lords. In particular, I hope that my noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lord Storey will take a very good look at this consultation document and feed their ideas into it. I assure noble Lords that we will review the effectiveness of the voluntary code over time. It will need some time to embed, but we believe that it will have a significant and lasting impact in changing culture, although we will review its effectiveness.
We all know that there is an issue to be addressed. There are different ways this could be approached, but we feel that the proposed new clause is not the best way to achieve the change we want. It seeks to amend other provisions, which themselves have not been commenced. If we were to commence the relevant provisions, including the regulatory regime for part-time institutions, that would require the Department for Education to register a large number of part-time education institutions, with all the complexity involved. More importantly, commencing these provisions would be unlikely to capture a wider range of settings, including those where there may be real cause for concern. Most supplementary schools are unlikely to qualify as independent educational institutions, so they would be unaffected by this change.
The real issue is not the technical difficulty that implementing this amendment would cause. The real issue is cultural: changing the culture which allows physical punishment of children to go unquestioned and unchallenged must be the right way forward. That is why we are focusing on this. I hope that my noble friends will engage with this next change and encourage my noble friend Lady Walmsley to withdraw her amendment.