Inner city school truancy rates are rising at an alarming rate, warn the Conservatives.

Damian Green, told the Commons that there was a larger than average rise in truancy in inner city areas last year.

Against a background of newspaper headlines about "teen tearaways" and with a woman recently jailed for 60 days for failing to get her two daughters to attend school, the shadow education secretary used an opposition debate to argue that the government is failing to help schools keep control.

Education secretary, Estelle Morris, has claimed 40 per cent of street crime, 25 per cent of burglaries, 20 per cent of criminal damage and a third of car thefts were carried out by 10 to 16-year-olds at times when they should be in school.

The Tories are concentrating on education as part of a concerted Conservative campaign to target concerns over the plight of the country's "most vulnerable people".

Green pointed to government pledges to show that ministers are failing.

"We all agree that truancy deprives children of their best chance in life but let's look at the facts. When this government came to power they promised a reduction by a third in school truancy," he said.

He told MPs that nationally truancy is up by 2.9 per cent on average and has increased by 61.1 per cent in Hackney, 18.8 per cent in Liverpool and 23.6 per cent in Leicester.

Green accused the government of talking tough but failing to deliver.

"The truancy problem is bad and getting worse. The government promised to cut truancy by a third yet and this promise has been comprehensively broken," he said.

"All the tough sounding measures the government has announced will not solve the problem unless they make education more relevant to vulnerable children who may be tempted into truancy."

A combative education secretary was in no mood to hear a lecture from the opposition benches.

Estelle Morris claimed Green was saying nothing new and had no solutions.

"The Honourable Gentleman was bereft of ideas, absolutely bereft of ideas. And indeed his analysis was so poor that it's not surprising that he's not got to the stage of having any ideas."

"What a cheek that the Tories after 18 years in power to come to this House as the Honourable Gentleman did and even murmur a word about those who are disadvantaged, those in the inner cities, those that are poor, those that are deprived," she said.

"The link between social class and education attainment in 1997 was more stark in this country than in any of our competitor nations. And that's what we've taken on," Morris argued.

"What I will not take from any Tory member in this house or outside of this chamber is any lecturing about their care for the education of disadvantaged children when we can see what their record is and we can see what the record is of the progress that we're making."

Morris claimed the government was spending 10 times as much as the Conservatives had done on tackling truancy and exclusion.

"The reason the government has set targets is so that we can be open and transparent," she said.

For the Liberal Democrats, Phil Willis said that after his experience as a headmaster and teacher he found it "absolutely galling" that the Conservatives had sought to criticise the government as very little had changed during the Conservative rule.

Willis claimed the government was doing a disservice by claiming that simplistic solutions would solve the problem.

"I think what is worrying is that what we are seeing now is a huge increase in street crime perpetrated by school children. I think it is an issue that we have to address. I think it is quite wrong to suggest that these things are just simply a new phenomenon," he said.

Willis said the children at the heart of the problem had to be included in the search to find a solution to the problem.

"Many of the young people I meet, when they talk to you about school they talk about never being listened to. If we genuinely want to make inroads, we need to listen to young people to find out why they are opting out," he said.