The Government will double funding to tackle truancy after a survey of schools found more than 30,000 children a day are skipping classes. The youth are the future of our country, writes The Marlborough Express. Parents of regular waggers should receive some well-planned mentoring focusing on the education their children, by law, should be receiving until the age of 16. Taranaki Daily News, In New Zealand, our "lost tribe" is not romantic; it is a clever euphemism to describe the few souls among us who are lost to the education system but who will invariably graduate to be our next murderers, rapists and thieves. 2500 young people who either regularly miss school or are not even enrolled should not be dismissed as a lost tribe of truants or poor unfortunates they are our future leaders – of major crime. Ashburton Guardian, Pouring money into solving New Zealand’s school truancy problem has to be one of the best investments a government could make in its future. Jobs have been created around identifying these kids and getting them back into the education system. . For those left to mop up the truancy mess, it’s a pretty thankless task, traditionally made all the more difficult by low funding levels. Enter the Government and a commitment to pour $32 million into truancy services. That’s $32 million that could be used in other areas of education if truancy did not exist. But it does and we ‘re finally recognising the need to doing something about it. Hopefully this investment will break the truanting cycle that is often inter-generational.