Parents taking their children out of school to go Christmas shopping will be targeted in a clampdown on truancy.

Welfare officials will tour shopping areas and other potential troublespots in Brighton and Hove in the weeks leading up to the festive break.

Youngsters who are skipping class will be rounded up and taken back to school.

The sweeps have previously been limited to the UK's ten "crime hotspots".

Parents will be given 12 weeks to get children who repeatedly play truant to lessons or face a £2,500 fine, or even jail, in a further crack down announced by the Government today.

Tony Wood, manager of the education welfare service in Brighton and Hove, said a sweep would be held in the city centre this month.

This follows a series of successful actions over six months earlier this year, in which 186 children were found skipping school.

Most of them were primary school children with their parents, who said they were being taken out for treats.

More work is being carried out at individual schools and there have been successes at colleges which had problems with truancy, such as Falmer High School and East Brighton College of Media Arts.

Mr Wood said patrols had also been carried out on trains in conjunction with railway police.

He added many schools operated a system of checking with parents or guardians by 10am if children had not arrived at school by then or given a valid excuse.

Mr Wood said: "This followed the scare at Hastings a few years ago when two girls went missing."

The girls were eventually found safe and well but if their absence had been known sooner, they might have been found quicker.

Ivan Lewis, an education minister, said: "What starts as "bunking off" the occasional lesson can spiral to missing out on vital stages in a child's education.

"This feeds into a cycle of underachievement and disaffection, which can lead to crime and drug and alcohol misuse.

"As a government, we are determined to tackle this but if we are going to make a real difference it is absolutely vital that parents also shoulder their share of responsibility."