The debate started last week in The Sunday Times on the future of denominational schools in Scotland is one well worth having and should not be seen as an attack on anyone’s religious beliefs.

The expression “faith schools” means a different thing in Scotland than it does in England, where there are many Church of England schools, as well as Jewish and Muslim establishments.

In Scotland the expression means one thing only: Catholic schools — of which, per capita, there are far fewer south of the border.

It is a legitimate question here, as in Northern Ireland, whether separate denominational schools help to perpetuate the sectarian divide. The stark evidence is that in large parts of Scotland they do, and the Catholic church buries its head in the sand if it pretends otherwise.

Even so, we should acknowledge that sectarianism is not a Scotland-wide phenomenon. No doubt it can be found everywhere but, let’s be honest, it is only a real problem in the west of Scotland, fuelled unfortunately by the adherents of noted football clubs.

I assert this from some personal experience. When I started school at the age of five my father was a Church of Scotland minister in Dumbarton and I attended the primary department of Dumbarton Academy. I have a clear recollection of junior taunts, when we threw stones at the “papes” at their primary school and they came to do likewise to us.

Needless to say, at the age of five and six none of us had a clue what a “pape” was. We simply knew they were different from us and that we were against them. But it is an indication of how deeply rooted sectarian antagonism was and sadly still is in many communities. It was not a pattern that was repeated when the family moved to Edinburgh.

Later in life, in pre-independence Kenya when I was at secondary school in Nairobi, the schools were all strictly segregated into European, Asian and African — white, brown and black.

We condemned apartheid in South Africa but operated it systematically in some of our own colonies right up to within half a dozen years of independence, when we calmly expected the new sovereign governments to operate multiracial democracies. The segregation in schools was damaging to good race relations, just as it can be in Scotland today to inter-faith relations.

In the Borders, as in other rural parts of Scotland, we have no Catholic secondary schools. The larger towns have Catholic primary schools: in the smaller towns and villages all the children attend the same schools. In at least two of the Catholic primaries, the majority of the pupils are not of Roman Catholic parents.

Three of my own grandchildren go to one of them, although their father is a Hindu and their mother a regular Church of Scotland worshipper. Why did the parents make this decision?

My son-in-law attended a Catholic school in Delhi and has a great esteem for the education he received. My daughter had gone to the local village school and the smaller size of the Catholic school appealed to her. They were both equally determined that their children should be educated in a school with a strong ethical foundation. There is considerable competition for places at the school from other like-minded parents.

The existence and success of these schools poses a question to all the others: why should all schools not have an equally strong foundation?

Some undoubtedly do: our parish minister regularly takes part in the life of the three small rural schools in the Ettrick and Yarrow valleys, but that is not a universal practice and, indeed, in last week’s start to the debate there were several references to “keeping religion out of schools”. I disagree.

Few parents would want to see narrow religious doctrines forced down the throats of their children. But in this day and age, when so many homes are devoid of any moral base, not to mention the increased numbers coming from broken homes, there is a strong case for inculcating at least a broad concept of moral law and religious education in all schools.

The Roman Catholic Church has much to teach us in this respect, but why does it insist on hiding its light under its own exclusive bushels? It would surely be better for its clergy and lay people to be seen to be working in open partnership with the other denominations and indeed those of other faiths.

Now that we have a substantial non-Christian population in our midst we should be educating our children in at least the basics of the different faiths, and that is best done in a non-denominational setting.

That should not be as difficult or revolutionary as it sounds. Look at the progress there has been in inter-church and inter-faith relations in Scotland over the past 50 years. Again, I recall the difficulty my father had in the late 1950s persuading the local Catholic priest to participate in a special service at his church in Linlithgow — permission had to be sought from the cardinal.

Nowadays such inter-church worship and collaboration is commonplace and no one has worked harder and more successfully for that than the present cardinal, Keith O’Brien, through the force of his own personality. The royal family, too, has set a good example in this area of our national life.

Is it possible that, in 50 years’ time, we shall look back with equal astonishment at the current debate on separate schools? I hope so. David Steel