Please come and collect Timothy...

It seems that parents are to be held legally responsible for keeping children who are excluded from school at home and off the streets - and very right and proper too, is my immediate response. But there is an unwritten assumption here that parents are able to leave whatever they are doing and get time off work at the drop of a hat in order to deal with such an incident, and I don't think this necessarily follows - particularly as regards the sort of parents who are most likely to find themselves in that position. I'm afraid it is symptomatic of the way that parents of schoolchildren are treated generally these days - whatever happened to the concept that schools were in loco parentis?