It is an honest, imaginative and radical response to the realities of inner-city education, and the schools lucky enough to be given a mentor will welcome such help with open arms.Provided, that is, that they're given the freedom they need to operate. The Government has declared that truancy must be reduced by a third by 2002. Many of their difficulties arose because they - and their (usually single) parents - just could not cope with the business of life For them, school is a big part of it. By creating these "learning mentors", the Government has acknowledged how tough this can be, and is doing something to help. With counselling and support, the boy's behaviour returned to normal and he remained in school.In the six months that I worked with these children and many more like them, I found myself doing things that should properly have been done by their mums or their dads - offering a shoulder to cry on, brokering peace-deals with teachers, or giving advice about everything from homework to relationships.

After social services and police interventions, and extended counselling, she finally settled into school.The 14-year-old boy who had got himself to the point of being thrown out for good by repeatedly molesting girls in the corridors, turned out to have been the victim of a different kind of sexual abuse. He eventually confided that a neighbour had been showing him hard-core pornography regularly We persuaded him to tell his mother, who told the police. Then she told to me that she'd been persistently sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend. He always smelled as if he had wet himself, and it fell to me to tell him what to do about it. A home visit revealed why nobody there had not noticed: the whole house stank like an unventilated urinal The bullying stopped, and the boy stayed the course. Another boy revealed why he never returned to school after lunch: his step-father came home drunk every afternoon, and the boy knew that if he left his mother alone, she would probably be given a beating.

We arranged support and protection for her, and the boy returned to school.A 15-year-old girl had been hovering on the verge of exclusion for years because of her increasingly aggressive and hysterical behaviour in class - she would, by turns, scream obscenities at her teachers, start fist- fights with her neighbours or sit sullenly sucking her thumb, refusing to speak. Underclass children fail to engage in, disengage from, or are formally removed from schools for any number of reasons.One boy refused to attend because of persistent verbal bullying "They say I stink," he tearfully told me He did. With truancies running at a million a year, and exclusions at 100,000, a lot of education is being lost, and many kids who aren't in school when they ought to be, are up to no good.Sixty-five per cent of juvenile crime is committed by children who are truants or who have been excluded from school. If these new mentors get it right - that is, if they present themselves as mediators rather than enforcers - they will win the confidence of young people and the gratitude not just of schools, but of society at large.The problems disclosed to them will be various. When I heard their stories, met their fragmented families, and visited their wretched homes, I understood why some of them behaved as they did, and why others just couldn't cope with school.And sometimes - but not always - I could help.The post I covered was funded by a charity, but it is the Government that will be paying for people to do jobs like it as part of a pounds 500m package of initiatives to keep children in schools and at their studies under its new scheme for learning mentors.