The Schools Minister has given warning that schools attempting to teach religious hatred to their pupils risk being shut down by the Government.

Jim Knight made the move after ordering an investigation into the Saudi Arabia-funded King Fahad Academy in Acton, West London, which had been claimed to use books that described Christians as “pigs” and Jews as “monkeys”. The school had promised to remove offending pages from the books. But Mr Knight said that he now wanted reassurance that the school was complying with statutory requirements to promote tolerance and harmony.

“It would be completely unacceptable for any school to have material which makes the sort of inflammatory assertions that are being alleged. I have therefore asked the department to make inquiries in relation to the recent allegations surrounding King Fahad Academy,” he said. “It is important to be assured that all schools provide their pupils with an education that allows them to acquire an appreciation of and respect for their own and other cultures in a way that promotes tolerance and harmony.”

The academy, registered in Britain as a charity, has about 600 pupils and makes the full Saudi curriculum available.

Last March an Ofsted report found the academy to be “satisfactory” but not to have met government requirements for registration. It was given 40 days to produce an action plan to correct weaknesses and is in talks with the Department for Education about its plan’s feasibility.

Mr Knight also announced yesterday that the Government had closed an independent Islamic school in East Sussex that was raided last year by police as part of an antiterrorist operation. The Jameah Islamiyah School, in Mark Cross, was shut down after it failed to follow an improvement action plan. It has had no pupils since last year and has not been operating for a term and a half.

Mr Knight said that 45 independent schools, including Islamic institutions, had been closed in the past three years.

David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, said that the controversy over the King Fahad Academy, which uses teaching materials provided by the Saudi Education Ministry, raised wider questions. He has written to Christine Gilbert, chief executive of Ofsted, asking whether its last inspection of the academy included an assessment of its religious materials and its approach to community cohesion.

“We need to know if the inspection included teaching materials provided by the Saudi Education Ministry and whether the inspection picked up offensive remarks against other religions in books and other materials,” Mr Willetts said. He has also asked whether Ofsted has received similar complaints about Islamic schools. Ofsted said that its inspectors did not necessarily comb through all teaching materials or books in the school.

“The inspection conducted in 2006 of King Fahad School had an Arabic-speaking Muslim inspector as part of the team. Inspectors look at the curriculum provision in schools and this would entail examining the schemes of work that teachers use, but not the detail of all the textbooks used,” a spokeswoman said.

The inspectorate was not “currently” conducting any investigations into other independent Islamic schools.

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