This week: Girls Leaving School

Carol Haynes is a short, jolly Yorkshire lass. Her Dad works at a pit, her mother keeps house in Goldthorpe, a mining village on the South Yorkshire coalfield. Last year Carol Haynes left school not because she was not bright enough to stay on, or because she wanted to leave, or because her parents needed the money, but because her parents wanted her to leave. Now she has had a year away from books, blackboards, chalk, and other children. Instead of exercising her mind on reading, writing, and arithmetic, she has been exercising her fingers on sewing seams for underpants in a textile factory. Last year her headmaster said: 'Carol could have taken seven or eight O-levels. She could have gone on to take A-levels and most probably could have gone on to university'. But Carol Haynes lives in an area where boys have jobs and girls have husbands. For a year we've watched her make the transition from school to the adult world. This year she's just sixteen.