Question 4: comparing perspectives

Question 4 asks you to compare how the two writers convey their different perspectives, their ideas and attitudes, on a topic. You use the whole of both sources.

You should:

• compare their different perspectives;
• compare the methods they use to convey them;
• support your ideas with quotations from both.

It tests AO3, is worth 16 marks, and you should spend about 20 minutes on it.

Source B: ‘My daughter's Saturday job’ (written for this app, in the style of a 21st-century newspaper column)

Every Saturday at half past seven, my fifteen-year-old daughter Ella pulls on a black apron and walks to the café at the end of our road. For the next six hours she carries plates, wipes tables and learns, mostly by making mistakes, how to be polite to people who are not polite back.

I'll admit I worried at first. Shouldn't a teenager spend her weekends sleeping in, seeing friends, doing homework? She has exams next year, after all. But the girl who comes home at two o'clock, smelling of coffee and counting her tips, is not the girl who left. She is tired, yes. She is also proud.

She earns her own money now, and she spends it carefully, because she knows exactly how long it took to earn. She has learned to talk to strangers, to keep calm when the coffee machine breaks, and to turn up on time even when it's raining.

None of this means children should work instead of learning. Ella goes to school five days a week, and if her grades slipped, the apron would go back on its hook. But a few hours of real work, chosen freely and paid fairly, has taught her things no classroom could.

Childhood isn't only about being protected. Sometimes it's about being trusted.

1. Sum up each writer's overall perspective in a sentence.
2. Find two or three points of comparison: their attitudes, and the methods each uses.
3. In every paragraph, write about both sources, linked with comparative connectives.
4. For each, analyse a method, such as tone, a word choice or an anecdote, and explain how it shows the writer's view.

Remember that the writers lived over 150 years apart: their perspectives come from different times.

Compare how the writers convey their different perspectives on children working.

Both writers describe a girl who works, but their perspectives are very different. Mayhew sees work as destroying childhood: the girl has ‘entirely lost all childish ways’, and his emotive phrase ‘cruelly pathetic’ invites the reader's pity and anger. In contrast, the writer of Source B sees a little work as good for a child. She uses short, warm sentences, such as ‘She is also proud.’, to show her daughter's growth. Where Mayhew ends on the girl's narrow world, Source B ends on trust: ‘Sometimes it's about being trusted.’

The top level (13–16 marks) needs:

• a perceptive comparison of the writers' ideas and perspectives;
• detailed analysis of how their methods convey those perspectives;
• a judicious range of quotations from both texts.