Michelle Donelan

Contributing to the debate on the policy that means parents can be fined for taking their children on holiday in term time. I want a smarter policy which places the trust in teachers and parents with the Head evaluating the child's age, stage of learning, absences to date and academic needs to assess if the holiday would be beneficial overall.

Travel is an excellent source of education and a lot of families can not afford to go away during school holiday time, meaning that the policy often punishes the socially deprived. Teachers need to be trusted to grant a sense or not on a case by case basis after all we are trusting them to educate and safeguard our children everyday.

Yesterday a former member of my staff was verbally abused and attacked whilst out shopping in London, because of the colour of his skin. He was chased down the road by a lady shouting about how we had ‘voted out’ and that people like him ‘shoot others’ and ‘blow up people. I asked the Prime Minister to reiterate the committment he has already given this morning, to do everything in his power to eradicate this evil hatred and reiterate that leaving the EU should not be used to breed racism but infact the opposite and provide us with an opportunity to be much more international rather than just european. #pmqs

Today I spoke about the importance of raising the profile and awareness of carers. Fundamentally there is still a lack of understanding about the role of a carer and the support that is available especially for pensioners.

I mentioned the fantastic local charities that we have including Carer Support Wiltshire, The Independent Living Centre and Fun For All.

I also stressed my support to include young carers in the criteria for Pupil Premium.

It is extremely hard to be a carer at any age but struggling to cope whilst trying to grow up and study must be unimaginably difficult and place a great deal of emotional pressure on young careers.

The pupil premium aims to help level the playing field – it is time we made sure young carers are on the pitch too

Yesterday I asked the Chancellor about the importance of working with our business community, to tackle our productivity gap and especially to ensure that we have a skilled workforce in engineering and design & technology to further boost our economy.

#Queen #Speech

#MichelleDonelan #Parliament #DECC #AmberRudd

#bbcwiltshire