Meet the parents

The Government has put feckless parents back on the public agenda. Wendy Wallace tries to find out just who it is they're talking about 'Luke, get out here. I ain't got all f***ing day.' These words and others in a similar vein, hurled across a Year One classroom by a fellow parent at the dawdling end of the school day, used to shock me and my son, then aged six. The speaker was a young woman with three small boys of whom my son's classmate, Luke, was the oldest. She was sometimes late at collection time and sometimes had a...