Clearly having no positive impact

Squirrel is scathing about her experience of the school's sessions on 'confidence building'.

When she tells us about her lesson on 'How to Keep a Positive Mindset' she looks as if she would positively like to hear glass smash.

Then she gets onto the subject of the video. 'Some white male footballers' she begins, 'a few musicians, and Einstein. Out of the dozen examples of people demonstrating a positive mindset there was a woman who went on to be a TV presenter, and the sum total of her negative experience was that once she got a comment that wasn't very nice at school.'

Squirrel tells us how she commented (loudly I hope) that in all the examples of successful character building in 'How to Keep a Positive Mindset', only a handful of examples were women - rather then the 50% she was counting on - and she would have thought that 'out of hundreds of years of women trying to change society where you needed a positive mindset everyday, there'd be more than a few pop stars and a TV presenter.'

Finally, her parting comment was this: 'My life since age 13 has been to carefully correct negative views of home education and why I am in it. I've sometimes gone on a walk to have someone assume I'm illiterate, been expelled, been excluded, been suspended, have behaviour issues, or something is wrong with me. When I was walking across that field with the woman who'd been talking to me for half and hour and she finds out I don't go to school, all she can say is 'Well you look normal'. I think I could tell anybody 'How to Keep a Positive Mindset' and I wouldn't need a video.'

Then she went upstairs to get on writing her novel.*

*She won't tell me, so I'll just assume it's a novel.