But even if the parent is not obliged to appear in person, but may send an application by note or verbal message to the teacher, there are still "missed" cases. It is notorious that many parents are too proud to let their need be known; in such cases, as teachers have frequently told us, it may be a considerable time before it is discovered that the child is suffering from want of food; and when the discovery is made there is frequently difficulty in inducing the parents to send the child, or in inducing the child itself to go, to the school meals. There still seems to exist, in certain districts at any rate, an idea that the provision of meals is Poor Law Relief, and parents consequently shrink from applying. Moreover, it is not generally recognised that the provision of school meals is by no means universally known to the parents. The School Medical Officer for Leicester reports that "in certain cases it was a matter for regret that the families had not received help earlier by personally applying for assistance. Ignorance of the existence of the Canteen Committee was given as the reason for non-application."[228] And we have ourselves been told in other towns of cases where the children were suffering from want of food, but were not receiving school meals because the parents were unaware that they could be obtained. Footnote 228: Report of the School Medical Officer for Leicester for 1912, p. 36. The enquiries into the home circumstances undoubtedly exercise a deterrent influence--to what extent depends on the manner of the particular individual who makes the enquiries--both with the more independent parent who resents the investigator's visit, and with the criminal and semi-criminal parent whose record does not bear close investigation. Thus the headmaster of a school in one of the worst districts of Liverpool told us that numbers of the boys were in need of food but the parents would not submit to the necessary enquiries and consequently meals were not granted. At Leicester, the searching enquiries made by the Canteen Committee, which, it must be remembered, is practically a department of the Charity Organisation Society, coupled with the insistence on an application by the parent in person, result, as we have seen, in numbers of underfed children remaining underfed. Where the Education Authority has adopted a scale of income on which to base the decision as to which children shall be fed, this scale is frequently below, and in some cases very considerably below, the minimum amount which has been shown to be necessary for expenditure on food.[229] Where the scale is rigidly adhered to, two classes of children are excluded altogether, those who are underfed through the neglect of their parents to provide for them though able to do so, and those cases where the family income may be sufficient to meet normal calls but where, owing to illness or the delicacy of the children or other special circumstances, extra nourishment is required.