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Class, ethnic and faith segregation are the most damaging reasons why the Accord coalition needs to prevail. But consider too the craziness of creationism now taught in many more schools than before. Homophobic bullying is worse in faith schools - hardly surprising since most sects preach that gay sex is sin, in Islam one punishable by death. Stonewall found 23% fewer gay pupils able to tell anyone about their sexuality, and least sex education in faith schools. All religions were founded on women's inferiority. In Islam what women wear is a battle-flag of identity, in Catholicism governing women's fertility is the die-in-the-ditch issue. The state can't protect children from pernicious views and doctrines at home - but it has a duty to protect them in state schools.

So writes Polly Toynbee in today's Guardian, which also has an editorial piece on religious schools along the same lines supporting the Accord Coalition, which is a new campaign arguing that religious schools should not be able to recruit either pupils or teachers on the basis of faith.

I've always been a bit embarrassed about not quite knowing what I think about religious schools. On the one hand, I'm an atheist and secularist, and don't like the thought either of religious indoctrination of children or of social segregation. On the other, I'm very aware if the failings of state education and think that genuine diversity (that's diversity used in the original sense rather than that of current political jargon) in education might help bring standards up. I'm not completely convinced by what Polly Toynbee writes: while I accept her point about there being a differnec ein social background between pupils in religious and other schools, a rate of 17% of pupils entitled to free school meals is not radically dofferent from 25%. Something in me suspects that driven teachers of all kinds - mad, bonkers teachers, even - whether Christians, black power activists, separatist feminists or masculinists who think boys are somehow oppressed in today's society should be given a chance to show whether they can produce results with kids, results in terms of academic success and in terms of behavioural standards. So I sometimes feel troubled that I'm not as certain as some of my secularist friends that religious schools should just be abolished. I console myself with the thought that they're not being politically realistic: opposing the existence of religious schools is as practical as opposing private schools. banning them just ain't gonna happen.

But it must be said that the main current risk in this area is the snowballing number of religious schools, and the increasing stridency of religious claims over religion, whether that be claiming a right to teach creationism, as I believe some schools amazingly do, a right for pupils to wear religious clobber or a right to discriminate in all manner of ways in hiring staff. While I can see the point, once you accept a school can be a Catholic school, of accepting that it should be able to recruit at least a preponderance of Catholic teachers. Further than that, however, things should not go. That still leaves me not quite in accord with Accord, which, it seems to me, religious people can pretty fairly characterise as a campaign to deprive the concept of religious schools of all meaning. I'd rather see all religious schools compelled to take some non-religious staff and pupils, to teach evolution by natural selection as factually correct, to prove that they do not discriminate on grounds of sex or sexuality and to prohibit any special religious clothes for girls.

I very much agree with Accord that (as they imply is now the case) religious schools should not be able to hire dinner ladies or caretakers on grounds of religion: that suggestion is outrageous.