  We investigate a class of actions for lattice QCD with staggered quarks aimed
at reducing the flavour symmetry violations associated with using staggered
fermions. These actions replace the gauge field link fields in the quark action
with covariantly smeared fields. As such they are an extension of actions
considered by the MILC collaboration. We show that such actions systematically
reduce flavour symmetry violations in the weak coupling limit. Using the mass
splitting between Goldstone and non-Goldstone pions as a measure of flavour
symmetry violations we find that these actions have considerably less flavour
symmetry violations than the standard staggered action, and represent an
improvement on what can be achieved with the MILC action, on quenched
configurations with $\beta=5.7$.
