Ex-Tory minister: free schools will let extremists in

The row about extremism in schools has over the past week widened out to the role of faith in education in general. This morning I interviewed Crispin Blunt, a former Conservative Justice Minister and Duncan Hames, a Lib Dem MP, for Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster. Blunt told me he fears that the Coalition’s own flagship free schools programme will sow division in England and allow extremist sects to educate children at the taxpayer’s expense. He went so far as to suggest that free schools would move England towards the situation in Northern Ireland:

'It is extraordinary that with 30 years of terrorist violence in Northern Ireland, where 95% of the children go to a school which is almost exclusively Protestant or Catholic, that it takes the American President to come here two years ago to point out the fact that we are continuing to build division into our society in Northern Ireland, and we're now starting to do it, particularly in England with the policies that we're putting in place.