School officials have no intention of abolishing corporal punishment soon, Education Minister Jerome Dill told The Royal Gazette .

Mr. Dill was responding to inquiries after Government Sen. Yvette Swan -- during this week's Senate debate of the Task Force on Child Abuse Report -- said the Education Department was reviewing the issue.

In the scathing report about the inability of Government and community-based services to deal with child abuse, the task force strongly recommended that corporal punishment be banned in all Government and private schools and from "all institutions providing care or accommodation for children''.

But Mr. Dill, when the report was released last summer, said he believed the Education Ministry "got it right'' when the punishment was kept in the new Education Act and the Code of Conduct for public schools.

And yesterday Mr. Dill said while educators were reviewing the Code of Conduct, released last June, corporal punishment was only a part of the code.

"Obviously it's not perfect,'' he said of the code which gives principals or teachers, in the presence of an administrator, permission to deliver up to four strokes of the cane or strap to a student's hand as a last resort.

"We said `let's see how it operates throughout the course of the first term' and we wrote to teachers, principals, and unions in January for feedback.'' Mr. Dill said the input from the groups will be correlated and the code would be amended, if necessary.

But he added that the corporal punishment aspect was "not going anywhere soon''.

Mr. Dill has stated that he disagrees with the task force's interpretation of the International Court of Human Rights' ruling on corporal punishment.

The ten member team, headed by former Attorney General Saul Froomkin, wrote: "Although corporal punishment has been denigrated by virtually all professionals, has been abolished in most civilised countries, including the United Kingdom, and has been declared by the International Court of Human Rights to be cruel and unusual punishment, this brutal activity is not only condoned in Bermuda... but is, according to the evidence presented to us, regularly employed.'' Mr. Dill, however, said: "We take the view that corporal punishment is an important option for educators to have.'' He has also pointed out that the majority of those consulted before the Code of Conduct was completed, including the National PTA and the Association of School Principals, were strongly supportive of keeping corporal punishment on the books.