While schools promise never to leave an author alone with children, you’d be surprised how many times a pupil is asked to take me to the classroom for my next workshop.

Plus, as Barry said, I get stopped in the street frequently by pupils from the local school. I’m someone they know and trust – but they don’t really know me at all.

I want everyone who comes into contact with children at my son’s school to be vetted – so why shouldn’t that apply to me when I go into someone else’s child’s school?

By boycotting schools, all the authors named in the article are doing is depriving children of an important experience. Why should they suffer because the authors think they are too well known to have to be vetted?

As for the fee – I’ll be spreading that across several schools, as Joe suggested, as a small addition to my expenses.

About the fee: surely most authors will just pass the fee on to the schools? If I split the fee across all the schools I’ll visit in the next, say, 12 months, it comes out at a couple of quid extra per school.

Don’t get me wrong, I can see both sides of the argument. As has been said, it’s very rare for an author to be left alone with children at a school, but simply by being there in school, the author then becomes a ‘safe’ person.

Before being stuck in here, I visited a few local schools. In the weeks that followed, at least a dozen of the pupils I’d met stopped me in the street to say hello. They all no doubt know never to speak to strangers, but by that point I wasn’t a stranger any more. They knew my name, and they’d already spoken to me in a controlled environment, so – again – I was ‘safe’.

Of course, I am ‘safe’. 99.9% of adults are. But if going on a database like this stops the 0.1% who aren’t ‘safe’ being put in contact with young or vulnerable people, then I’m all for it.

That said, I think the registration fee’s a bit of a kick in the teeth…