Sir – While agreeing with Paul Surman in many ways (Letters, June 26), I think it would be rather drastic to withdraw state funding entirely from religious schools, and to close them down would cause unnecessary disruption and unsavoury reactions.

One reason that these schools deserve a subsidy is that they do remove from the state the necessity of educating the children they teach; and in villages particularly the primary school next to the church is a long-established institution which does no great harm.

Much the same can be said of the tax relief enjoyed by those privileged non-state schools which consider themselves charities for the mainly rich, mostly nominally attached to a particular religious denomination too. (The question of who goes to these, and of selection generally, is another matter).

What I do feel strongly is that the broad-based religious education syllabus should be the same everywhere, and these lesson should be strictly inspected too, without this interfering with the chosen style of worship and other quaint religious habits within the school.

In fact, the children of committed devout parents need more than other children to be aware of the alternatives which exist.

After all, the point of a history syllabus is to make one aware of the past existence of different ways of living, without denying or denigrating the way we live now.

I don’t see why the parents of 21st-century Muslim or Roman Catholic children living in England (who will be learning about Henry VIII, and even the Crusades) should object to either syllabus.

For the tolerant old Church of England, it would be business as usual.

If Mr Surman has in mind the gross distortion of other syllabuses, for example biology, this is disgraceful whether the state pays or not, and should be banned absolutely.

Roger Moreton, Oxford