AS IN THE LONG AGO

Chris Priestley raises issues in his blog about the new Independent Safeguarding Scheme and its application to children's authors visiting schools. As he says, we discussed it during a very enjoyable lunch, and I've been thinking about it since. Everyone else who works in schools has to be checked, so why should authors be immune? Are they different in some mysterious way from other humans? We all know that most abuse of children takes place in the home and that therefore all the vast apparatus of CRB checking which already goes on is only going to stop a small proportion of this abuse, but I think we've accepted that such procedures are really the only way of preventing a repeat of an event like the Soham murders. I know that writers are seldom alone with children on school visits. I know the chances of anything bad happening are small. But I think we should remember the case of William Mayne, one of the greatest children's writers of the twentieth century who ...