With the possible exception of budding musicians and authors who will be able to rock and write on the dole, no-one can doubt New Labour's conviction that there is too much welfare around, and that it has engendered a culture of dependency. Mr Blair and his Social Secur-ity Minister, Mr Frank Field, are determined to change that culture largely by eradicating welfare for all but the truly needy and deserving. Even then they will be set conditions with which they must comply if they are to continue to receive benefit. This principle is now being extended, dubiously, to education.

Argyll and Bute Council has decided that senior pupils in receipt of a means-tested bursary will need to achieve a school attendance rate of at least 95% or they will have to pay back the value of the grant. Absence confirmed by a medical certificate will be allowed, but anything else will not. The council's education chief correctly emphasises the crucial corollary between attainment and attendance and points out, properly, that an employer would not tolerate employees coming to work for only four out of five days a week (as the current threshold allows). There is also the point that the bursary is intended to encourage young people to stay on at school.

They are also old enough to take responsib-ility and appreciate the implications - and cost - of truancy. But extending the penalty for non-attendance to withdrawal of child benefit and clothing and footwear grants, options raised in a consultation paper produced by Glasgow City Council, is another matter. The council has the worst attendance figures in Scotland and is seeking to raise the level of debate by challenging a government which makes great play of tough choices. Ministers maintain that deprivation is no excuse for truancy but we doubt very much that effectively worsening poverty levels by punitively withdrawing benefit from families on welfare (which already have an ingrained negative attitude to education) will help. And not all truants are from deprived backgrounds.