WITH the new school year only in its second month, parents and their truanting children are being targeted in a new drive to make pupils attend their lessons.

Unannounced swoops are being staged by teams of education welfare officers and police across Lancashire. They will be visiting two different towns each week to haul in youngsters who should be at school.

It is a stepped-up effort that is plainly needed - when, shockingly, earlier anti-truancy swoops have found that up to two-thirds of truancy is condoned by parents. Indeed, the extent of this kind of unauthorised absence was brought home by a crackdown staged in just one East Lancashire town last year which, in only two days, netted 130 truants who were with parents at the time.

What kind of parent is it that actually encourages a child to miss lessons - when not only do truants risk falling behind at school, but also end up lacking qualifications and opportunity in life? Worse, as well as it being an acknowledged factor in a wide range of social problems including vandalism and nuisance, truancy is a dangerous path that often leads to the evils of drug dependency and a life of crime.

But whether it is out of indifference or deliberately that parents permit their children to truant, the problem needs to be firmly confronted .

This means not only detection, in the form of these town-centre swoops, but also by strong deterrence from the courts - which, as recent cases, including one here in East Lancashire, have shown, can impose jail sentences in cases of 'aggravated' truancy.

For there is depressing evidence that the truancy problem is getting worse - as was seen by the swoop in East Lancashire catching dozens more absent children than a similar one in the same town five months earlier.

Not only must the drive against truancy be stepped up; it must be kept up.