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Education and Inspections Bill

Yes, but it can be extremely difficult to make alternative arrangements. It takes time to do so and that should be recognised. Also, there is no sense in which exclusion is a punishment for a seriously rebellious child. You cannot do anything with them that they would regard as a punishment. Being locked up in their room with their comics and television is not a serious punishment. Being made to trail around behind Mum may be. The idea that being out of a public place is more of a punishment than being in a public place properly supervised is not correct. It makes life extremely difficult for the conscientious parent and employee. They cannot even take their child to work and make them sit in the corner studying their books, which is a solution that might be allowed by reasonable employers to help out. They are not allowed to say, ““Come on. You can come with me and help me wash the dishes or clean office””, or whatever else. It is wrong to think that incarceration is the only form of punishment. The punishment is actually on the parents in this case. The people who will suffer are the parents, and the child will suffer because the parents are suffering. That is the mechanism being used. To inconvenience the parents sufficiently for them to want to discipline the child it is not necessary to tell the parent, ““You go home and stay home for five days””, in order that the child should be properly disciplined. For this provision to be workable we need a broad and reasonable interpretation of ““reasonable justification””. That will only be based on whatever guidance the Government choose to provide, because the servants of the state in their great wisdom are fond of pettifogging interpretation of the rules. That may not be in every case, but we are all familiar with people who have been arrested for reading newspapers in Whitehall because that happens to contravene some aspect of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 in the interpretation of the police officers involved. That sort of thing goes on throughout the country in all sorts of petty and unreasonable ways and we do not want that applied to parents. We want a good solid set of guidance. The difficulty at the core of my amendment is this business of not being in a public place because that is obstructing the proper treatment of the child and obstructing arrangements that might be made to use that period for education and reintegration for the child. It is an unhelpful interpretation.