Children must not be indoctrinated

The row over creationism at a school in Gateshead has some important implications for the funding of the state education service. According to Nigel McQuoid, the headteacher of Emmanuel City Technology College, the school where the controversy started, pupils are offered a variety of views about creationism and evolution and left to make up their own minds on the issues. However, as David Frost suggested on BBC 1's Breakfast with Frost, this could be bewildering for pupils. It is like teaching in one lesson that the world is round, and in another that it is flat.

The row might, at first, be dismissed as a little local issue that could be sorted out by Ofsted, the Government's education standards watchdog. If this were all it was, inspectors could revisit the school to ensure that the pupils were being taught to question the theories being propounded, and were not simply being indoctrinated.

But there is more to the story. Not only does Sir Peter Vardy, the school's pro-creationist benefactor, propose to fund more state schools to be run along similar lines but, as our sister paper The Independent on Sunday revealed, several other church schools take a similar biblical line to the teaching of creationism. The state-funded Seventh Day Adventist school, John Loughborough and the high-performing Hasmonean High School for girls and boys, which educates more than 1,000 strict Orthodox Jews, both in north London, teach the biblical explanation of how the world was made.

It therefore becomes an issue that is at the heart of the Education Bill being debated in Parliament and likely to become law by the end of this session. The proposed legislation advocates more faith-based schools, and outlines plans for every new secondary school to be advertised, so that private companies as well as faith groups can put in tenders to run them. What if the creationist lobby applied to set up a new string of faith-based schools? The stock answer from the Department for Education and Skills is that every new proposal has to be scrutinised by civil servants, to check that the school's benefactors are fit and proper people to be running a state school, and that they will teach the national curriculum.

Some strict guidelines must be drawn up. We need to ensure, as Nigel de Gruchy, the general secretary of the National Association of Schoolmasters Union Women Teachers, put it so eloquently, that the green light is not given to "every crackpot religious group to start peddling their own mad fantasies in schools".

The Prime Minister, when questioned in the Commons, refused to be drawn into the controversy, saying only that Emmanuel had "good results" and stressing the need for diversity in the state education system. If those were the only criteria used to decide which groups should be allowed to sponsor and have a say in the running of state schools, the education system would be in danger of seriously short-changing pupils in some of the new schools being set up around the country.