Sir, Mohamed Mukadam, the chairman of the Association of Muslim Schools (report, Sept 11), is wrong. A key component of the debate about faith schools generally, and not specifically Muslim ones, is not one of religious fundamentalism but one of community cohesion.

On Panorama in May this year, Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, expressed his concern that the only thing the Muslim community in his Blackburn constituency had in common with everyone else was that “they breathed the same air”. On the same programme, Professor Ted Cantle, who reported to the Home Office on “parallel lives” after the riots in Burnley, Oldham and Bradford in 2001, said of the town: “There is not just simply residential segregation, but there is separation in education, in social, cultural, faith, in virtually every aspect of their daily lives, employment too.” Such sectarianism is also painfully obvious in Northern Ireland and Scotland, where single-faith schools contribute to sectarian blight.

It now seems that the Government intends to combat segregation by even more religious apartheid, separating children and adults along religious, and thus often racial, lines by opening more faith schools.

Perhaps Jack Straw and Ted Cantle will explain to us how this latest initiative of more segregation will solve their “Blackburn question”.

ALISTAIR MCBAY, National Secular Society London WC1

Sir, Several years ago we found that Asian and West Indian Christian children were not gaining places at the Church of England comprehensive school in Coventry. We corrected this anomaly. At the same time we pressed for the children of “those in good standing in other religious groups” to be allowed to apply to the Church school. The governors granted a 20 per cent quota of good Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. This has benefited the school, the pupils and our multicultural community.

Our experience of welding people of 30 nations and all religious groups into a cohesive community has helped us to welcome and include people of another 30 nations who have come as refugees and asylum-seekers in recent years.

We are now looking to establish a multifaith school in the Foleshill area. We have the friendship and the confidence in each other; now we need the support of the Department for Education to help us to advance in this so much better way.

JIM CANNING, Foleshill, W Midlands

Sir, The decision to adhere to a particular faith is at least as important as that to follow a career, to study an academic subject at university, to borrow money or to get married. At the end of their secondary education, nearly all adolescents should have learnt enough to make up their own minds on these matters and know from where to seek advice.

No public money should be used to support schools whose declared objectives include the limitation of knowledge about all religions and alternatives to them.

The appropriate balance in this country would be freedom for voluntary associations to run faith schools, while state schools are funded by taxpayers to educate about faiths, including the arguments for and against them.

ADRIAN NORMAN, Crowcombe, Somerset

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