Anyone walking around the centre of Bradford cannot fail to notice that even during term time there is no shortage of school-age children around. That perception is confirmed by a disturbing police report today.

In a two-day crackdown on truancy, police and Bradford Council educational social workers rounded up 38 children who should have been at school, two of them a brother and sister aged nine and ten who were there with their parents' consent to buy school shoes, books and crayons. And they also counted a further 48 children accompanied by adults.

Bradford Central Police's Youth Services Officer, PC Ian Walmsley, generously suggests that there could have been perfectly good reasons for these 48 not to be at school, such as illness. But surely if they were too ill to go to school, they were too ill to be shopping in Bradford.

Parents who keep their children out of school to accompany them on trips to town for anything but the most pressing reasons, or allow them to go shopping alone during school hours, are behaving irresponsibly and setting a dangerous example. They can hardly be surprised if the youngsters decide school must be unimportant and go on to play truant.

Councillor Susanne Rooney is right to stress the legal responsibility on parents to ensure that their children go to school. Those parents who treat attendance lightly risk causing long-term damage to their children's education. Even worse, they expose them to the sort of welfare risks - of becoming criminals or the victims of crime - run by youngsters who trail around town unaccompanied.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.