Are Approved Schools the Answer?

Jenny played truant from school to visit cafes. Then she ran away with a married man. Carol refused to go to school after failing an examination. She started taking 'purple hearts and slipped out at night to visit London with parties of boys. Daily Mail columnist Monica Furlong went to see the girls parents. Now she asks whether the decision to send the girls to an approved school was the best that could be done to help them. Mr. Adams showed me the photograph of Jenny, an extremely pretty sixteen-year-old. She had always been pretty?an enchanting baby with curls and lovely eyes, a graceful schoolgirl who would have caught one's eye in any crowd. 'Perhaps that was part of the trouble,' said her mother. Jenny had always been stubborn, and very lively, unlike an older sister who was placid and law-abiding. She had also had a fierce sympathy for the underdog , and when she became friends with a girl whom both parents and teachers disliked, no amount of persuasion could make her give up the friendship. With her new friend she went to a lorry-drivers' cafe on a big, main road and started to pick up men. She ran away to Southend with a married man, but gave herself up at the police station after a few days, asking them to telephone her family. She was to repeat the running-away three times, each time giving as her explanation that her feelings welled up inside her and she couldn't stand it. On other occasions she would go out and walk for hours on end, staying out alone or with her dog for most of the night, too agitated to return or to try to explain. Afterwards she could only say that she had been unhappy, whether because of her parents or not she couldn't or wouldn't say. 'You wouldn't understand.' Her boy friends tended to have bad records. 'She always seems to take to anyone who has been in trouble.' Of this stage of their problem the Adamses say that they felt different people pulled different ways. The police were comforting and supporting, partly because they had had so much experience of this sort of situation and made the Adamses feel less alone with it. They urged the parents to bring their daughter to court after the third episode of running away. The child guidance people wanted to go on …