Clocking up a first

When Andrew Newsome failed to turn up for school for the whole
summer term, social workers in Birkenshaw, West Yorkshire, were
obviously unfazed by the daunting display of professional skills
required to get the boy’s feet back under his classroom desk.
Shortly before his mother was clobbered with a £50 fine for
omitting to send the 15-year-old to school, they found an
inspirational cure for the boy’s chronic inability to get out of
bed in the mornings. They presented him with an alarm clock. ‘Now
there won’t be a problem,’ his mother told Dewsbury magistrates.
Would that all social work could be so simple.