Teacher 'banned after telling Muslim child that Britain is Christian country'
A teacher was banned from working with children after telling a Muslim child that “Britain is still a Christian state,” it has emerged.
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The primary school teacher who worked at a school in London was referred to his local child protection board and a senior Scotland Yard detective was brought in to look at the case.
According to the Telegraph, the teacher was suspended and sacked for an incident in which he allegedly admonished students for washing their feet in the sinks in the boys’ toilets.
Police were also called in to investigate an alleged hate crime. According to a child, the teacher said the school was not a religious one but there was an Islamic school a mile away if they wished to attend that instead.
He reportedly said: “Britain is still a Christian state” and that the King was head of the Church of England.
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Lawyers for the teacher later pointed out that the school was not a faith school and that prayers had been informally banned from the playground.
However the school suspended the teacher in March last year and subsequently sacked him.
In April this year the teacher was told he had been referred to the safeguarding board and the police had been informed. Police action was later dropped.
The teacher is now suing the local authority with support from the Free Speech union.
He succeeded in appealing a ban from working with children and is now understood to be working part-time at another school outside London.
Lord Young, the director of the Free Speech Union, said: “This teacher lost his job and almost ended up being barred from the profession for life just because he pointed out to a class of Muslim schoolchildren that the national religion of England is Anglicanism.
“Things have reached a pretty pass in this country if a teacher can be branded a safeguarding risk because he says something that’s incontestably true.
“If he’d claimed that Islam is the official religion of England, even though that’s not true, I doubt he would have got into any trouble.”