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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I will just make two short points. I find myself in broad agreement with the noble Lord, Lord Alton, particularly on Muslim schools, and cannot support my noble friend’s agreement. Of course, I take the point that there are real dangers in Muslim children being educated in Muslim schools and living quite separately from the rest of the community. Yet I do not see how my noble friend’s agreement will solve that problem. I do not believe for one moment that non-Muslim parents will queue up to send their children to Muslim schools. I fear that my noble friend envisages that children will be finding their way there when it has been in no way their parents’ choice. In the present state of community relations, I am not sure that that will help in any way at all. So far as Catholic schools are concerned, I am not a Catholic, but Catholic parents would have every reason to complain if their children were denied the opportunity to go to the local Catholic school by making room for the children of parents who are not members of that church. A great injustice would be done, in the hope that some unquantifiable benefit would accrue to society as a whole. That is the worst sort of social engineering.