IN A nominally-Christian country, it may come as a shock to find a school seeking to opt out of the long-standing requirement that morning assembly includes recognition of the Christian faith.

Yet, the bid by governors of Hawthorns County Junior in Blackburn to be exempted for the rules is, surely, much closer to reality than the code from which they are seeking to depart.

For 95 per cent of the school's pupils are Muslims.

And continuing with the existing rule that says assemblies and collective acts of worship have to be of a "wholly or mainly Christian content" would entail both absurdity and hypocrisy - and do little to promote the moral principle on which, in a different age, the code was founded.

Society is much changed , having, particularly in our towns and cities, become multi-cultural and multi-faith over two generations.

The rules for "Christian" assemblies in schools are out of step with this. And there is much evidence that only lip-service is being paid to them in many schools where, like the Hawthorns, the pupils are from mainly non-Christian backgrounds. The rules, of course, owe much of their origins to the involvement of the Christian churches in the establishment of the country's school system.

But if existing church schools may have a right and good reason to cling to them, it is hard to understand why those, like the Hawthorns, which are not attached to any church, should have them imposed upon them - and, above all, when the intake belongs to an entirely-different faith.

The ideal would be to secularise all state-aided non-church schools and let parents, who wish it for their children, seek religious education outside the school system. And even with that change, schools would still be able to impart moral values to their children on secular lines.

Indeed, it is down that path that many schools may now go - though the newly-allowed opt-out that the Hawthorns is seeking still requires a quasi-religious element to be retained in school assemblies in recognising a "non-denominational entity" as opposed to a Christian God.

But if many find this an uncomfortable break with the past, they must realise that is what it is - and a step towards reality and a different sort of future.

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