THE announcement last week, to coincide with its Academy status, that St Wilfrid’s Technology College was to tighten its admission policy in favour of those of the Anglican faith, has stirred quite a hornet’s nest.

But is it fair to criticise St Wilfrid’s? Isn’t this what faith schools are there for?

The school system in this country is a product of our history.

From the start of the separate Anglican church under Henry VIII, until very recent decades, the ‘confessional divide’ between Protestants and Catholics, in England and not just Ireland, was profound.

Catholics could not hold any public office until the mid-nineteenth century; a hundred years later there was still incipient discrimination against them.

Unsurprisingly, in a hostile environment they sought to educate their children to their own faith in their own schools; so did the Anglicans, and the non-conformists.

Early state education was effectively ‘contracted out’ to the separate denominations.

Nowhere more so than Lancashire – which explains the high proportion of faith schools today across the county.

In the early 1990s the ‘new’ faiths (for the UK) of Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, asked why, if Christian faiths had faith schools, why couldn’t they?

I was Labour’s Education spokesman at the time.

My answer was that they should, on exactly the same terms.

It will be ‘divisive’, claimed some in the teacher unions.

In that case, are you arguing for a ban on faith schools? Or a ban on non-Christian faith schools?

They backed off.

Blackburn is ethnically divided, but that too is a product of our history, and of people’s preference about where they live.

(Brits abroad have almost always lived separately).

There’s good work by all faiths to bring the communities better together.

One thing that won’t work is social engineering, by which children are forcibly mixed in schools, through ‘bussing’ or state direction.

Despite (because?) many Catholics and Anglicans have been educated in distinct schools, the intense divisions between them have largely broken down.

This will happen with the new faiths. It just takes time.

There are few short cuts.