SCHOOLS without a “spiritual ethos” risked generating “individualism, functionalism and ultimately fragmentation”, the Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday.

Delivering a wide-ranging critique of secular schools in his first address on education since becoming Archbishop, Dr Rowan Williams said that the contemporary trend for teaching tolerance in schools was “all too successful”.

Instead of true tolerance, however, it manifested itself in teenagers as “an incurious co-existence, even a bland acceptance of mutual ignorance and non-understanding, in the name of not passing judgment”.

By contrast, true openness was “a willingness to be curious, to argue, even, yes, to judge”.

Dr Williams, speaking at Exeter University to the Association of Anglican Secondary School Heads, made reference to the role of religion in the terrorist attacks in America two years ago.

“We have been reminded of what a colossally significant role religion plays in the life of millions,” he said.

“If this is so, do we want religious communities isolated and ghettoised further or do we need a bold engagement with the vision of religious groups for humanity on the part of public bodies?” Dr Williams was speaking just weeks after Church of England and Roman Catholic schools once again outperformed non-religious state schools in the annual league tables for secondary education.

There are about 4,500 church schools in Britain, mostly in the primary sector, where they also outperform non-religious schools in the annual test results. About 200 are Anglican secondaries.

Such is the demand for church school places that the Church of England is planning to acquire two comprehensives in Merseyside alone.

Dr Williams and the Archbishop of York, Dr David Hope, are backing plans to use up to £10 million of church funds to increase the number of church schools nationwide. A recent review by Lord Dearing suggested that up to 100 more Anglican secondary schools were needed.

Tony Blair is among those in favour of expanding the number of church schools.

Dr Williams conceded that there were differing approaches to education.

“There is a real tension in educational thinking between those whose concern is primarily, almost exclusively, with imparting skills to individuals and those who understand education as something that forms the habits of living in a group, identifying common aspirations and making possible co-operation and conversation.”

He continued: “One of our major problems at the moment is a rhetoric among some of those who manage education which seems to assume without any qualms that the former, functional model is self-evidently what drives the business of education.”

He called for stronger links between church schools and the wider Christian community, and guardedly acknowledged the widespread phenomenon whereby parents suddenly became avid churchgoers as their children approached school age.

“The fact is that very many students in a church school will have their primary exposure to shared religious activity in school,” he said. “They and their families will not regularly and invariably be part of a worshipping group, whatever motions may have been gone through by parents to win places.

“What the school does corporately as a Christian body will be, to all intents and purposes, how these parents and students will experience the reality of church.”

Dr Williams argued that hostility to religion in education could be destructive, especially when pupils came from a religious background. “It is as if, where there are already resources in people’s lives and communities that shape their behaviour and thinking, they must be ignored in the processes of statutory education as irrelevant or even harmful.”

• The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor, will today call for “institutional and social change” in Catholic schools, parishes and families when dealing with racism. In an address to the Catholic Association for Racial Justice congress in Roehampton, southwest London, the cardinal will argue that it took the murder of Stephen Lawrence to bring public recognition of institutional racism.

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