BRITAIN’S main faith groups will be brought together today to consider how education can be used to ease religious and racial tensions.

The day after Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, gave a warning that the row over Muslim women wearing the veil could provoke riots, Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, will meet representatives from the Church of England, the Roman Catholic Church, the Muslim Council of Britain, the Association of Muslim Schools, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Network of Sikh Organisations. Mr Johnson will explain why the Government is to give local authorities the power to require new faith schools to admit up to 25 per cent of pupils from different faiths or no faith, and review progress on the agreement by faith schools to teach awareness of other faiths. He has called the meeting because he sees education as the key to preventing social division.

Mr Johnson has already suggested the exchange of teachers between different religious schools.

Mr Phillips appealed for calm over the issue of Muslim women wearing the veil. He said that he was disconcerted that debate about the issue seemed “to have turned into something really quite ugly”.

He told Sunday AM on BBC One: “I, this morning, really would not want to be a British Muslim because what should have been a proper conversation between all kinds of British people seems to have turned into a trial of one particular community, and that cannot be right.”

Mr Phillips appealed for Aishah Azmi, the teaching assistant who lost her discrimination case over her right to wear a veil in class, to drop her appeal against the decision.

He said: “I think she would be doing the nation a favour, and I think we would all feel very warm to her, if she said, ‘OK, I understand the issue here and I’m going to take a solution which doesn’t involve more working through the courts’.”

Mr Phillips also wrote in The Sunday Times that divisions risked becoming “the trigger for the grim spiral that produced riots in the North of England five years ago. Only this time the conflict could be much worse.”

It was disclosed yesterday that the Government is funding an Islamic website that tries to spread moderation in Muslim communities.

Money from the Department for Communities and Local Government is being used to pay for videos and podcasts on www.radicalmiddleway.co.uk.

Official funding for Muslim groups has been switched from the Home Office to Ruth Kelly’s department.

Last week she said that funding would be “rebalanced” to favour groups that opposed extremism and that it was not enough for Muslim groups to remain “on the sidelines or pay lip service to tackling extremism”.

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