The Minister’s decision has been based on the results of a consultation carried out between November 2012 and February 2013.

I believe this is a disproportionate response to a problem which requires a far more creative response than a fining system.

Evidence shows that children from poorer backgrounds are more likely to play truant and achieve poorer educational outcomes. I am concerned that fining parents of truant pupils will cause them even more economic hardship and will do nothing to address the problems of their child missing vital school hours.

It is also crucial that we consider the reasons why children are often absent from school.

There were just 53 responses to this consultation, including only 12 of the 22 Welsh local authorities, along with 16 schools/headteachers and 12 parents/carers. Of those 53, only just over half – 55% – agreed with the penalty notice option.

Fixed penalty fines can never replace targeted intervention and effective engagement with pupils and parents.

Whilst parents must take responsibility for their children’s behaviour and fulfil their obligation to ensure they attend school, a community-wide approach involving parents, police and local welfare officers would be much more effective than theses punitive measures being implemented by the Education Minister.

This is yet another attempt at a quick fix by the Minister which is unlikely to be of any benefit to the families concerned.

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In the wake of the Mid Staffordshire scandal, I am calling for a change in the law to require minimum staffing levels for nurses in Wales.

The idea of setting minimum staffing quotas was put forward in the Francis Report, which looked at failings in the care provided by Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust and cited long-term low staffing levels as one reason which contributed to poor treatment.

While the Francis report predominately dealt with the NHS in England, figures from the Royal College of Nurses have revealed that Wales lags behind the rest of the UK in key indicators of nurse staffing levels. In Scottish wards there are 8.8 patients per patient, England 8.5, Northern Ireland 7.2 but in Wales each nurse will have to care for 10.5 patients. We also have the fewest nurses as a percentage of all hospital staff.

It is staggering to see the vast difference in the ratio of nurses to patients in Wales when compared to the rest of the UK. Once again Welsh Labour’s poverty of ambition has led to our NHS having to do more, but with less.

Nurses in Wales are working incredibly hard and are doing a great job, but there simply are not enough of them on Welsh wards to cope with the ever increasing number of patients. Earlier this year I visited an A&E department with a family member. Whilst I was there I met a nurse who was due to finish her shift 5 hours before she saw us. She could not go home because it would have left the ward with a dangerously low number of members of staff on duty. She was doing a very good job but was understandably tired. If she had made a mistake, would that have been her fault? Nurses make life and death decisions every day, they need to be as alert as possible.

Legislation requiring a minimum number of nurses per patient has been introduced in California, New South Wales and Victoria (Australia) where it has improved nurse staffing levels and patient care. Studies in California have shown that such a change has significantly reduced mortality rates.

Nurses who have fewer patients to tend to are able to spend a greater amount of their time with each patient and, as a result, can provide better care. Better care would mean we can get people out of hospital quicker and end the so called ‘bed-blocking’ we have heard a lot about recently, clearing space for other needy patients.

More time spent with patients would mean they would be more easily able to identify potential problems, then they are able to a play a preventative, rather than simply reactive, role. Not only would this lead to fewer patients needing treatment, but it would consequently mean less cost to the NHS.

While employing more nurses will mean more spend in the short term, I believe that the improvement in patient care and long term saving for the Welsh NHS will be worth it.

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What’s emerging in this debate is that there are three basic positions. The first is UKIP’s and an increasingly large number of Conservatives’ – they want to leave now. I am clear that would be a calamitous mistake for the country – it would make us poorer, make us less safe and jeopardise millions of jobs and billions of pounds of investment.

The second position is the Conservatives’ official position (at least for now) which amounts to saying to the rest of the EU that they should keep all the EU rules for themselves, but we’ll only abide by the bits we like. It’s a have-your-cake-and-eat it strategy. It might sound seductive, but it’s unlikely to work. Instead it will end up with either largely symbolic concessions from the other 26 member states “inconsequential” in Lord Lawson’s words – or demanding so much that the other EU countries will simply refuse.

The third position is the Liberal Democrats’ position. Of course the EU has to change. It is going to change because it’s in a state of challenge and flux and so needs reform. It must be more competitive, more open, leaner and less bureaucratic. All things Britain should lead from the front on and work constructively with our European partners to achieve.

That is a vision of Europe and Britain’s role in it that our party has long subscribed to. And importantly, it is actually achievable.

And in line with our previous manifesto, and the legislation we passed in 2011, when the EU rules change and new things are asked of the UK within the EU, the British people will have a say in a referendum. We are the first Government ever to give the British people such a guarantee in law.

So there are three positions: we can leave now; we can try and (almost certainly fail) to have our cake and eat it; or we can play our part at the heart of Europe promoting reform and guaranteeing a referendum when the EU rules change affecting Britain.

But as I argued in PMQs to the Tory backbenchers (who by the way seem to have developed an almost unhealthy interest in our Focus leaflets!), people are facing more pressing issues. And it is exactly those issues Liberal Democrats in this Coalition Government are currently taking a lead in tackling.

We won’t always get the attention or coverage we deserve for things we are doing, such as introducing Steve Webb’s single tier pension or the important work Norman Lamb has been talking about this week on Social Care. But we will keep delivering these things that make a real difference to people’s lives.

That is what we are in Government for: anchoring it in the centre ground and building a stronger economy and a fairer society.

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Any funding programme has to ensure that students are given the best opportunities whilst ensuring that public money is spent efficiently and effectively.

It is clear from my experiences as a member of the Children and Young People Committee that deficiencies currently exist in ensuring that the funding system takes account of both the needs of employers and the subsequent destinations of students.

Given the scale of change and the tight timescale over the timetable – particularly with regard to the work to be undertaken by Careers Wales during 2013 in respect of the Common Area Prospectus and Electronic Application Process – it will be crucial that the organisations involved are clear about their responsibilities.

There is clearly a need for more commonality between the 14-19 networks as well as a need to ensure individual institutions, local authorities and teaching unions are fully engaged in the process given the potential financial impacts on individual institutions and on staff.

It is unclear from today’s statement which employer organisations will be participating in further consultation prior to new guidance being produced in September and I look forward to more details being made available as the project progresses.

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I congratulate the government on creating over 6,000 job opportunities and filling two thirds of them; that alone is a substantial task and deserves credit.

However the success of a job creation scheme should be judged not just on the opportunities created, but more importantly on how many people take part and then go on to find meaningful employment as a result.

Figures that I have obtained show that only two thirds of the placements created have actually been filled, and only two thirds of those are then completed. On that basis, the success rate is just 44% for the whole process, rather than the 79% success rate claimed by the Deputy Minister this week.

We also need clarification of the costs of this scheme. There are no figures outlining how much it cost to create each sustainable job, and that must be cause for concern. While every job created is transformative for the individual involved, we need to know that Jobs Growth Wales is a cost-effective way of creating employment opportunities. Without substantially more information from the Welsh Government, there will be a question mark over the success of this scheme.

I’m also concerned about the regional variances in the number of jobs created and the number of jobs filled. The percentage of jobs filled ranges from 50% in Swansea to 80% in Merthyr – clearly we need to make sure that young people across Wales have an equal chance of getting a job, regardless of where they live.

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While the sector enjoys significant support across Wales, there continues to be a sense that we are a difficult country in which to do business, and that we lack strong leadership at the top of government.

In order for Wales to build a long term sustainable economic future we must all ensure that supply chains, community projects and benefits are placed at the very centre of energy policy development.

When the First Minister formed his Government in 2011 he stated that this term was meant to be about delivery. The Welsh economy cannot afford a further thirteen years of stagnation.

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Never events are serious, largely preventable patient safety incidents that should not occur if the available preventative measures had been implemented.

These are incidents that are so serious they should never happen.

A Freedom of Information request to the Welsh Labour Government reveals that the mistakes fell into three categories. There were 10 cases of foreign objects left inside the body; 8 cases of surgery on the wrong part of the body and 5 cases of tubes, which are used for feeding patients or for medication, being inserted into patients’ lungs.

While I understand that mistakes are made in our health service, it is particularly important that the NHS learns from its mistakes that are on this scale.

’Never events’ are very serious incidents in the NHS that are preventable because guidance has already been issued to explain how risks and harm could be prevented.

It is quite disconcerting that we still see incidents where plastic tubes and hypodermic needles are left in the patient after an operation or a procedure has been carried out on the wrong part of the body. It is also of great concern that half of these serious incidents happened in Cardiff and Vale University Health Board. Clearly, this Local Health Board needs to constantly review its procedures to avoid incidents like this happening in the future.

I can appreciate that over four years, 24 incidents doesn’t seem that serious but when NHS labels them as ‘never events’, we shouldn’t be seeing any cases of this severity at all.

It is important that the Welsh NHS learns from its mistakes so that cases like these can be avoided in the future.

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There are many excellent schools in Wales with hard-working teachers and students but, overall, most measures of education standards show Wales in decline when compared to the rest of the UK.

Labour Ministers must take responsibility for this decline but I am not going to play the party political game and spend most of my time attacking the current Labour Government in Cardiff Bay. We need to look to the future and the Liberal Democrats were doing just that last week when we led a debate entitled Putting Pupils First in the National Assembly.

Part of our policy is already being implemented as a result of an agreement to support Labour’s budget for the 2012/13 financial year and maintained by Labour for the current financial year. That is the ‘Pupil Deprivation Grant’ which means that each school currently receives an additional grant of £450 for every pupil on free school meals. In North Wales that equates to over £6m extra for our schools.

We believe that education is the best way to break the cycle of poverty, poor health and a weak economy. No longer able to use the extraction of our natural resources to power our economy we need to invest in our young people.

Liberal Democrat members in Wales have been discussing education over recent months and in our recent Senedd debate I was able to put forward some of our conclusions.

To raise school standards we need a system which tracks the abilities and potential of individual pupils helping them to reach their full potential. Let us take one example. At the moment schools are measured on how many children have achieved 5 A*- C grades at GCSE and this leads schools to ignore those at the top and bottom of the academic ladder in favour of those in the middle who might be expected to get a D grade – the more C grades the higher the school’s position in the tables.

Individual pupil monitoring programmes have already been tried in some schools and been shown to improve attainment. The evidence shows that where teachers set challenging and realistic expectations for pupils then improved success rates are achieved.

We in the Welsh Liberal Democrats are convinced that individual pupil monitoring is the only way forwards and, as with the Pupil Deprivation Grant, we hope that Labour’s Welsh Government will reconsider their objection to our new ideas.

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The worst reaction Tories could have to Ukip’s rise would be the one they look determined to pursue – parading their dissatisfaction with Cameron’s current Europe policy. Even before the council elections, Conservative MPs were lobbying the Prime Minister to underpin his promise of a 2017 referendum on renegotiated EU membership with a parliamentary vote this side of an election. Then Nigel Lawson, the former chancellor, declared the whole renegotiation strategy pointless and urged a prompter plebiscite. Enough Tories prefer the Lawson plan to Cameron’s for unity to be lost.

Only the Lib Dems insist that the centre ground is where it has been for a generation – between an expensive social conscience and flint-hearted frugality. They are also alone in wanting a hung parliament, which remains the likeliest general election outcome in 2015. The real disruption to the established way of doing politics may yet turn out to be not protest votes but coalition; not the noisy arrival of Farage but the stubborn survival of Clegg.

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Just a few highlights from the Government’s plans for legislation this year, outlined this Wednesday in the Queen’s Speech, designed to build a stronger economy and a fairer society in Britain, enabling everyone to get on in life.

The state opening of Parliament is an eccentric highlight of the year in politics. Pomp and pageantry are not really my thing, but I’ll confess to a certain affection for the whole rigmarole: you have probably seen the marching up and down and slamming of doors in people’s faces on TV. One thing you might not know is that we had to work to a very strict deadline to finalise Her Majesty’s words. That’s because the speech has to be written out on goatskin and it takes a few days to dry.

Plus of course, it’s rather fun to see my usually austere colleagues Alistair Carmichael and Dick Newby dressed up in robes looking like refugees from Hogwarts or a Gilbert and Sullivan production. One thing’s for sure: I’m relieved there aren’t any Deputy Prime Minister robes to wear.

What matters most is the substance of course. We made sure all the big measures needed to grow the economy, create jobs, and improve people’s quality of life were included. But we also made sure some things – plans for a Snooper’s Charter tracking everyone’s emails and social networking – were kept out.

It won’t have escaped your attention that the mood has changed in the Conservative Party after the local elections, and that changes the rhetoric we’re hearing from them – about equal marriage, development aid, and most of all Europe. The lesson for us is clear and simple: it is more important than ever that we stick to our path. Our job is to anchor the Government in the centre ground, stopping others from lurching this way and that and making sure the Government delivers our core objectives: a stronger economy in a fairer society.

That’s why major liberal reforms and investment – from childcare to pensions – will remain the core business of this Government. Not endless navel-gazing about when and how a referendum may take place in years to come in circumstances we can’t predict. We Liberal Democrats must remain focused on the things people really care about, whatever other parties may say.

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