Text 1: The man who knocks on doors, by Naomi Pendleford

An original contemporary newspaper feature.

Marcus Bell has knocked on more doors than most politicians. As an education welfare officer for a large secondary school, his job is to find out why children are not in class, and then to get them back. On the morning I spend with him, he has a list of nine names, a flask of coffee and a firm rule: never begin with the law.

‘If I start by talking about fines, the door shuts,’ he says. ‘Nobody keeps a child at home because they don’t care. There’s always a reason. My job is to find it.’

The reasons, it turns out, are varied. One boy has been sleeping on his aunt’s sofa since his family lost their flat, and the bus from her estate takes an hour and forty minutes. Another is being bullied about his trainers. A third simply cannot face the noise of a corridor at changeover. Marcus writes everything down in a small notebook with a broken spine, and promises nothing he cannot deliver.

The last house is the one he has been worrying about. Fourteen-year-old Shanice has missed six weeks. When her mother finally opens the door, in her dressing gown at eleven in the morning, the reason is obvious: she is ill, and Shanice has been looking after her and her two younger brothers. Marcus does not lecture. He sits at the kitchen table, accepts a cup of tea he clearly does not want, and talks about young carers’ groups, about a later start, about a teaching assistant who could meet Shanice at the gate.

Fines and court are still possible, he admits later, and once or twice a year he goes that far. ‘But a fine for this family would be like charging someone for drowning.’

A fortnight after my visit, he sends me a two-word text: ‘She’s in.’ I find that I am absurdly pleased.

Text 2: From the diary of a School Board visitor, by Edwin Rowe

An original diary written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

These diary entries were written in 1877 by a man employed to visit homes and make sure that children attended school.

March 3rd. Forty-two calls today in Paradise Row and the courts behind it, and not, I think, a single friend made. The children see me coming from the end of the street and the cry goes up, ‘The School Board man!’, so that by the time I reach a door there is nobody of school age to be found within.

At number six the mother told me plainly that her girl Annie, aged ten, could not be spared, being needed to mind the baby while she herself took in washing. I said that the law was the law. She said that the law did not mind babies. I wrote down the name, as I am instructed, and felt very little satisfaction in doing it.

At the corner of the Row I found two of the Cassidy boys selling matches, which they have been doing, by their own account, since they could walk. When I told them they must be in the schoolroom on Monday, the elder asked me who would pay their father’s fourpence a day if they were. I had no answer.

March 9th. Before the magistrate this morning with eleven summonses. Most of the parents were fined five shillings, which the greater number cannot pay, and some will go to prison in default. Mrs Dewhirst, Annie’s mother, wept in the court, and the magistrate told her severely that she should have thought of the consequences. I believe she had thought of very little else.

I do not doubt that the Act is a good one. A child who cannot read will be a poor man all his life, and I have seen what that means in these courts. Yet I sometimes wonder whether we are punishing the parents for being poor, rather than for being careless. I mean to speak to the Board about the matter, though I do not suppose they will thank me for it.

Both of these texts are about getting children to attend school.

Compare:

• what the writers say about why children miss school and how adults try to get them there
• how the writers present these experiences

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