OVER the last few weeks, several West Dorset schools have sent parties of their pupils to visit Parliament. Some of these, I have met in order to be interrogated by the pupils – though in one case, they happened to arrive just as a series of votes were taking place and my Parliamentary Assistant therefore had to take my place.

These groups come in an organised way to Parliament. There is an efficient system that provides them with a guided tour and a workshop as well as the opportunity to meet their MP if he or she is available at the relevant moment.

There is a suite of rooms that have been specially constructed to accommodate such groups, and there is even a system in place to pay part of the costs that the school incurs in bringing the pupils to Westminster.

I have sometimes heard people express scepticism about the value of this sort of activity, compared to spending a day back in the classroom. But I don’t actually share this scepticism.

These children will rather rapidly grow up and become citizens and electors. If we want our liberal democracy to be sustained, we do need to make sure that they enter the adult world with some idea of the institutions at the heart of that democracy – and there cannot be many better ways of fixing in young minds a memorable image of Parliament and what it does.

It’s all too easy to slip in to believing that people will naturally acquire an understanding of how our democracy operates as they grow up, without any particular effort being made by our schools to foster that understanding. But, in an age when most young people will probably never read a newspaper before they reach adulthood, and when a high proportion of them will not even have watched traditional news programmes on traditional broadcasts (as opposed to engaging with social media and the Internet), this assumption that an understanding of democratic institutions will be acquired naturally by osmosis is dangerously outdated.