The car dealer Sir Peter Vardy is a rich man, with a desire to use his money to promote education. He seems to have become embroiled with a clique of evangelical, American- inspired creationists who teach that the entire universe is less than 10,000 years old (which dates it some time after the middle Stone Age).

Vardy has set up the Vardy Foundation, an educational charity with a strong Christian ethos. It is campaigning to take over “failing”schools in the north of England. While teaching the national curriculum, the schools will almost certainly be pushing a bizarrely anti-scientific version of cosmology and biology.

The schools, prior to takeover, were vulnerable because, being in poor areas with disadvantaged children, it was easy to criticise them as “failing”. And Vardy has discovered a golden goose in the shape of the government’s city academy scheme, which encourages private enterprise both to fund and take an interest in the education at state schools.

Some might argue (though we would not) that a sufficiently generous foundation has the right to have its chief benefactor’s views influence aspects of the curriculum, even if some of those ideas are more or less bonkers. But the city academy policy by which a rich man need contribute only £2m in order to buy a government contribution of £20m (plus running costs and salaries in perpetuity), is much harder to defend. It enables the benefactor to secure for his own nominees a majority on the school’s governing board, and even the power to select pupils.

The ability to influence young minds should not, however, be sold off like a catering franchise. In particular, to a bidder who only has to put up just under 10% of the costs, leaving the rest to the taxpayer.

This is what now threatens the unfortunate Northcliffe comprehensive school in Doncaster. Unless the teachers and parents can stop it, the Vardy Foundation, which already sponsors Emmanuel college in Gateshead, is on its way to adding Northcliffe to its growing empire of schools noted for their controversial teaching of creationism.

Of course, Northcliffe could benefit hugely from £22m. But, the teachers and parents argue, if the government has £20m to give, why not just give it without handing Vardy the right to influence teaching in the school? They’d gladly forgo Vardy’s £2m, if it rid them of the lunacy of a fundamentalist approach to creation.

Northcliffe comprehensive caters to some of the most disadvantaged children in all Doncaster. If you measure its achievement against other schools with similar disadvantages, it has succeeded brilliantly. And by what other standards should a school be judged? Any school can get respectable exam scores given good starting materials and lots of money.

Even judged by conventional standards, Northcliffe was improving creditably, under difficult conditions, in the years leading up to the Vardy approach. In 2001 and 2002, it was given a school achievement award, and in 2003 it produced the best GCSE scores in its history. This was a school on a rising curve.

But in spite of this and only three months after Northcliffe’s best-ever exam performance, the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) put it on the blacklist for “special measures”. Then the local education authority indicated a willingness to entertain a role by the Vardy Foundation in its relaunch.

From an education authority’s point of view, to have a school in its locality with no capital or revenue expenses to pay is like winning the lottery. But most Northcliffe teachers are up in arms at what some see as a stab in the back.

Parents are unimpressed too and have set up the Conisbrough and Denaby Parents Action Group (www.cadpag.co.uk). Local people are planning a rally at the school this weekend, followed by a protest march against the takeover by Vardy’s fundamentalists.

The move on Northcliffe comprehensive is only the latest phase of the Vardy Foundation’s controversial bringing back of fundamentalist Christian teaching to certain schools. Emmanuel college became something of a cause célèbre in 2002. The headmaster, Nigel McQuoid, now director of schools of the Vardy Foundation, said that evolution and creation were both “faith positions”, implying that there is nothing scientifically to choose between them. This is deeply misguided.