In my country, if your grades are that bad that you must redo the school year again and again..SS take actions. They will tell you that said child mental development is endangered (school is a priority here and without it there is no way you become a proper adult..they say) So again...
Not only you are forced to attempt school, but you must pass. If they do not find any good reasons for said child to not be able to pass and get better..they take said child away. The family environment must be faulty.

If that ever happens again, you can go into the game settings and turn off displaying snow on the ground. Then you can see where the baby is and, with moveobjects turned on, pick it up and put it back in the house, then turn the snow back on. But yeah, stuff like this is why I don't use nannies very often. In fact, I'm kinda anti-NPC in my game in general. No nannies, no maids, no gardeners, no social worker, no matchmakers no alarms that summon firefighters, no....nothing, pretty much.

Anyway, my general game, when I'm not playing various specific weird scenarios, is not so much "realism" as "the world as I would have it be." So, it's sort of a "sunshine and roses" version of "real." Meaning, I don't want it to be a reflection of our ugly reality that includes things like child abuse and bigotry, but I do want things to make sense. So, leaving babies/toddlers alone makes no sense, but I'm of the opinion that leaving older kids alone for a few hours (assuming that they live in a generally safe area and that they know who they can go to if an emergency happens and stuff like that) is not a problem and, indeed, teaches them some responsibility and begins to give them some confidence that they can handle things on their own, which I think are good things. So, I'm fine with latchkey kids in my game. So yeah, I think the SW is overzealous about ridiculous things that she need not be zealous about but isn't concerned about things she should be, so out she goes. I can otherwise put a "social work" sort of structure in place manually. If I wanted to. Which I really don't. My pixel kids end up in an orphanage only if their parent(s) die(s) and they have no family who can take them in. Which can happen since I use RealSickness. I've never really felt a need or had a reason to actively take pixel kids away from their parents. *shrug*

Personally, I would like the Social Worker to:

- Allow kids to be home unsupervised for an hour before the school bus arrives, and after school until 6.15 pm (i.e. until someone who finishes work at six gets home). Kids shouldn't be alone after dark, and parents who finish work at 7 don't actually get home until after dark.

- Show up for grades only if more than one child is failing (or the child is an only child) AND the child has a poor relationship with both parents (or the only parent). I'm not sure how that would play out for the Newsons, who have no parents, but the one time they were taken it was the right decision - it was for Gabriella's grades, but Ginger was seriously not coping, so perhaps if there are no parents, they could be taken for grades only (grades plus being orphaned, really).

- Not show up or send warnings when a kid is overheated due to jumping on the bed or freezing from throwing water balloons on a scorching hot evening (seriously, EA?). Kids should be programmed to stop playing and warm up/cool down when they get too hot or cold. The SW should only come if they're unable to get themselves a drink or warm up somehow.

- Not take a child if the care-taker dies, provided there's another suitable care-taker who happens to be at work or school at the time. The SW or a nanny could show up and look after them until somebody gets home. Possibly the same for an alien abduction, but only if it's the abductee's first abduction, otherwise they knew it could happen and shouldn't have taken the risk.

- If the care-taker dies and there is nobody else in the household, the SW should show up; if there are relatives living elsewhere, the game should pick one and ask if you want so-and-so to take in the children. If yes, they vanish from their current lot and appear with net family worth in the other household; if no, they are taken into care and the estate is lost.

- If she says she's coming for a hungry, dirty, lonely, wailing baby or toddler, she should come within a couple of hours, not post warning after warning for hours or even days before she finally rescues the kid! (But only if the child is crying, not if it's sleeping.)

I've had a playable social worker and liked it much better. There was a girls' home and a YMCA, both staffed, and then I had a floater who would pick up the kids and bring them to the appropriate home, or occasionally she'd stay with someone who was trying to be a good parent but for whatever reason just couldn't cope, like a widower with four kids. She mostly stayed in the bin so she wouldn't age between jobs. When the older nun retired, the floater became the permanent staff member at Notre Dame and I created a new floater.

In a case like this, initiate an action that will cause a teen or older sim in the household to fetch the baby, such as feeding it a bottle from the fridge or putting it into a crib. They should head out to wherever the baby is and pick it up. Even if they can't get to it for some reason, hopefully they will go far enough in the right direction to give you an idea of where to look. If all else fails, switching to Build/Buy mode should temporarily clear the snow so you can see the ground and look for the lost baby.

I think the problem with sick children is that their grades continue to drop while they're off school, and the social worker will eventually come and remove them for their bad grades, rather than because they're sick, but the end effect is the same.

I like the sound of that mod by Nysha that Charity linked to. But I think it might clash with my existing mods, so I'll try it out carefully. I use Inge's School Changer and her Simlogical Flexi School (which simply keeps Sims at home without their grades dropping). I also use Jenflower's Homework Sometimes Faster Fun.

I realise that some of my views on education are unusual and rather controversial. It's the compulsory nature of school that upsets me, especially today, when compulsory education has been extended right to the age of 18. I wasn't really bullied at school, but I saw other boys, some of them my friends (it was an all-boys school), mercilessly bullied for years, and I really don't know how they survived it. It must have been just as bad as for my playful Sims, coming home from school with their Fun meters in the red. I tend to think that, if you're not enjoying education, it probably isn't doing much good. Some of my Sims like Andrew and Julian (no doubt helped by Jenflower's mod) love school. Others hate it. If teens hate school, I generally let them quietly drop out by enrolling them in Simlogical Flexi-School, which stops their grades dropping. I'm not quite sure yet what to do with younger school-haters: maybe home school them -- or that mod by Nysha that Charity linked to might help.

I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to education: I believe in education for its own sake. It should be free and available to all who want it, but I don't like compulsion.

Sorry for drifting a little off-topic.

I put out the simlogical school sign if kids are sick, tricks the game into thinking they have gone to school.

I'm awful. If I'm doing school at all, my sick pixel kids get one sick day, same as sick adults who have jobs. Otherwise, off to work/school with you! *whipcrack* (This is mostly because I enjoy playing large families, and I use RealSickness as a form of population control so that my hoods don't get too huge and overwhelming to play but also so that I don't play favorites, so there's an element of random when it comes to who lives or dies. So, I don't coddle the pixels too much when sick.)

Anyway! FWIW, @AndrewGloria, I share a lot of your views about how we (at least in the West) educate our children in publicly-funded schools. On the one hand, warehousing kids en masse in institutions that teach them a compulsory common curricula with the goal of passing tests is the most practical way to do it, as far as I can see, given our society and how it developed and how it works and the educational standards we as a society want to have. On the other hand, it is obviously not the BEST way to do it, given the outcomes that we see. Among many other problems, that system squashes kids' natural desire to learn and makes them hate learning, which is, IMO, tragic. This is one of the reasons why I homeschooled my kids. (Well, one of them, anyway. ) But on yet another hand, homeschooling is fraught with problems, too. Many parents are unqualified to teach, for instance, or just simply don't have the disposition for it or the time to devote to it, if it's a two-parent family and they both work, etc. And unfortunately, homeschooling is most often used more as a tool to indoctrinate children into various religious sects where the goal is to insulate them from concepts that conflict with the teachings of said religious sects. Which is a whole other issue. But if everyone WAS qualified and capable and motivated and properly equipped to homeschool and their goal was to educate and not insulate and/or indoctrinate, it's well known that such one-on-one attention gives better outcomes. All parents being qualified, etc. is obviously NOT the case in the real world...but I can declare that it is in my game.

So, I use homeschooling a lot in my game. It's partly because I play a lot of rustic scenarios where there would logically be no organized school, anyway. At least not "yet." But it's also because I just don't like the concept of institutional schooling, and I really, really don't like the entire concept of homework. So even in "societies" in my game where there "should" be school...there often isn't. *laugh* Because, yeah, it's "the world as I would have it be."

Bullying is something that shouldn't happen at school and happens outside school as well (where it also shouldn't happen). So, it's the bullying that needs to be dealt with rather than the going to school. And as for playful sims, Maxis did kind of screw that up, which is why we have mods. XD

There is also homeschooling, although it's illegal in some countries. While schools should stop bullying reality is they aren't, but even without bulling parents should have more options for their child's education; be that homeschooling, cyber schooling, part-time or full-time schooling.

I like to believe that the schools in my neighbourhoods are just like the one on Summerisle in the original 70s version of the Wickerman; just some creepy children with a way too shallow genepool dancing around a maypole and chanting about fertility symbols all day. There's also some entrapment of beetles on occasion.
Not sure what the homework is in this case, probably just thinking up new and creative ways to trap beetles and how to manipulate outsiders into getting sacrificed for a good harvest.

The simplest thing to do here is to pause the game and switch to Build or Buy mode. The game will then use the default base game summer lighting, plant models, etc. and all snow will disappear until you go back into Live Mode.

Edit: ninja'd by Devon Aster.

To keep sick kids from getting dinged for staying home, I use Cyjon's School Sick Days mod, because it really is silly for kids to be docked a grade for needing to rest and recover. Granted, a parent might have to stay home as well or call in a nanny but them's the breaks when you have kids. Besides, adults usually have way more leeway in missing a day of work and won't get fired just for one day if they don't have vacation days.

The Sim world is full of illogic, isn't it?