Ofsted’s chief inspector has warned of the dangers of privately-run faith schools which fail to teach children about their responsibilities to British society.
There are now about 250 private faith schools – about 100 Muslim, more than 50 Jewish and more than 100 evangelical Christian schools. Altogether the Muslim and Jewish schools alone are educating nearly 24,000 pupils.
David Bell called on the government to monitor the growth in these schools to ensure pupils are taught about other faiths and “the wider tenets of British society”.
“Parents should be able to choose how their children are education and should be able to pay to do so. That is the mark of a free and open society.”
But he warned, “We must not allow recognition of diversity to become apathy in the face of any challenge to our coherence as a nation. We must be intolerant of intolerance.”
Bell also criticised the teaching of citizenship in maintained secondary schools, which he said was the worse taught subject. Pupils' political and social apathy poses a risk to the long term cohesion of local communities, he warned.
