The Ministerial Consultative Committee on Women and Child Affairs took up two strands of child policy at its meeting in Parliament on 22 September: the legal amendments needed to prohibit corporal punishment of children, and a plan to bring all preschools under common standards by 2027.
The meeting was chaired by Minister Saroja Savitri Paulraj, with Deputy Minister Dr. Namal Sudarshana, other deputy ministers, MPs and officials of the Ministry of Women and Child Affairs attending.
Corporal punishment
The Committee considered the legal reforms required to strengthen protection of children from physical punishment, the Daily Mirror reported.
The discussion follows evidence of scale rather than isolated incidents: the National Child Protection Authority reported more than 11,400 corporal punishment complaints in a two-month period earlier this year. Sri Lanka has no outright statutory ban, and existing protections sit across several instruments rather than in a single prohibition — the gap the proposed amendments would close.
Preschools
The Committee also discussed introducing common standards for all preschools by 2027, together with a common training and certification system for preschool teachers, the Daily Mirror reported separately.
Members drew attention to infrastructure shortcomings in existing preschools and the need to address them as part of the same effort.
Preschool provision in Sri Lanka is fragmented between local authorities, private operators and community centres, with no single national qualification for teachers — which is why a shared certification system, rather than the standards alone, is the harder half of the 2027 target. The 2027 date matches the timeline the government set out in May for early childhood education reform.
Neither report states whether draft legislation or regulations exist yet for either measure, or what the Committee resolved.
