UK Parliament / Open data

Holiday Pricing

Proceeding contribution from Natascha Engel (Labour) in the House of Commons on Monday, 24 February 2014. It occurred during Backbench debate and e-petition debate on Holiday Pricing.

I absolutely agree. Our problem at the moment is that we have one national policy that is supposed to apply to everybody, and it is not working in the case of teachers, police officers, and the armed forces. There are lots of individual professions that will have problems. However, the head teachers that I have met know the parents and their children. We do not want a situation in which it becomes too easy to take children out of school—there would be abuses of that—but in the case of families with the lowest incomes and the greatest pressures on family life, where a lot of the families are breaking up, that is far worse for a child than simply missing a couple of days of its education because it has gone on holiday. We need to look at that a lot more carefully. I agree with the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole that we need to look at the guidelines more carefully. We must not impose so harshly on schools and use such a threatening tone with parents. For people on a low income, the inability to ever go on holiday would be a great shame.

4.59 pm

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
576 c8WH 
Session
2013-14
Chamber / Committee
Westminster Hall
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