RELIGION and schools, now there's a thorny one, worthy of discussion surely, and not just because some of us received religious instruction of a mildly demented nature, with a spot of hell and damnation squeezed in between English, Latin, hopeless rugby and maths, the last taught by a bearded, onetime pilot who continued his airborne pursuits by testing the aerodynamic properties of blackboard rubbers.

Tony Blair, our prime minister on high, puts great faith in combining religion and schools. His three eldest children attend Catholic schools, and that's his business - but why is he so keen to extend the influence of such separatist schools for the rest of us?

Mr Blair apparently believes that expanding religious schools will raise standards and will also be popular with all those poor parents who are having to dust off their prayer books and bend their creaking knees in an attempt to find their religion, just so their offspring can be squeezed into a local church school.

If I had my way, and this is pencilled in for that long-awaited day when I become a benign dictator, religion would be banned from schools. Such a policy would certainly make me popular with generations of pupils, including a 13-year-old first-born son of my close acquaintance.

It would be acceptable to teach pupils about morals, to show them how they should behave in society, to explain their responsibility to others - but all without illustrations from the Bible. I don't think of myself as an entirely Godless person, but this business of yoking together schools and religion worries me. Why, for instance, do children in England have to take a GCSE in religious instruction?

Naturally, with all prejudices considered, I was pleased to see that two Yorkshire MPs - one sitting locally, the other born hereabouts - yesterday combined in a revolt over Tony Blair's plans to introduce more church schools.

Labour MP Frank Dobson, who sits for Holborn and St Pancras but was born in York, and the Liberal Demo-crat Phil Willis, MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough, led a backbench revolt against the resurrection of religious schools.

Mr Dobson sensibly suggested that religious schools should be forced to reserve at least a quarter of places for children of other faiths and none. This was a fine proposal, which Mr Dobson supported with the following sentiment: "There is a fundamental point: should groups of people be given public money to discriminate against other groups of people?"

No, Frank, I don't think they should.

Mr Willis, himself a former head teacher, said what "we are trying to do is ensure schools become more inclusive and start to look at their communities", words of much good sense.

Sadly, Mr Blair got his way yesterday in steam-roller fashion, as usual.

Looking for other guidance on this matter, I turned to the Secular Society, which has a very good website devoted to non-religious studies. The society speaks out against religious involvement in publicly-funded education, noting that if "society at large is to enjoy and come to terms with its diversity, children from different cultures must be encouraged to get to know each other from the earliest age".

The society also points out that "religious schools... tend to divide society because, as a result of them, pupils become segregated into religious groups which then tend to become exclusive".

Sounds like copper-bottomed good sense to me.

Tony Blair should be free to send his children to a religious school, as too should friends of mine who do likewise. But the idea that extending the number of religious schools will somehow improve education is surely at best an unholy distraction.

Updated: 10:55 Thursday, February 07, 2002