Paula, a 13-year-old schoolgirl, was terrified when she entered the busy office in Glasgow and sat across the desk from a man she did not know. She had not come to meet the headteacher of a new school, education officials or even a social worker. She was there to see her lawyer.
Partially sighted, Paula had been subjected to systematic bullying so severe that her mother was keeping her home from school in Edinburgh. After fruitless appeals to social workers and the local education department, she and her mother Jacqueline Wallace had decided there was no alternative but to take the fight to the officials - and that meant hiring an aggressive solicitor.
