Across the way from the House of Lords where Baroness Cox set out to impose Christianity by statute on England’s secular schools is Westminster City Hall, whose right-wing politicians have been doing their best to get local schools to carry out her aims. Between the two lies Westminster Abbey, to which Christendom has come through the centuries to celebrate its victories.

The Abbey’s precentor, the Reverend Paul Ferguson, does not appear to regard the 1988 Education Act as a great triumph for the Church Militant, and sees it as a source of uncertainty and problems for teachers. He and his fellow-members of Westminster’s Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education, headed by radio and television rabbi, Hugo Gryn, see a key part of their task as helping to guide teachers through the moral maze surrounding school worship in a borough with very many diverse faiths.

The council, a heteredox assembly of the godly and the more or less heathen, numbers a humanist, an agnostic, and a Bahai among its members, and until recently included a Rastafarian. There used to be a Tory politician who wanted a no-nonsense Christian approach, but now she has gone they all agree on the need for tolerance and a broad interpretation of the legal requirement.

Angela Piddock, head of Wilberforce Primary School, who represents the National Association of Head Teachers on the SACRE, says that her fellow-members understand how delicately teachers have to balance the law’s requirements with their duty to the children: “My first concern is to ensure that nothing that is said or done in an act of worship or a lesson causes anxiety or distress to any child. It is not always easy for those of us who have had a conventional Anglican upbringing to realise that some of the statements or practices we regard as non-denominational may strike a Muslim or Jewish child as blasphemy.”

And even teachers who are aware of the susceptibilities of children of other faiths, says Ms Piddock, may not stop to consider the needs of those who are non-believers. An agnostic herself nowadays, she says that even in primary schools there are children who are agnostics or atheists: “Whether or not we approve of their views, they have a right not to have to pretend to be joining in prayer. It is highly immoral to make children act out a lie.”

The SACRE’s members seem happy with her own approach to the act of worship, which follows guidelines it has set out. Her teachers talk about a religious or related theme as a lead-up to a period of silent reflection in which children are told they can pray if they wish, meditate on some of the matters discussed, or explore their own feelings of wonder in the world of which they are part. To provide the legal quota of worship of “a broadly Christian” nature, more than half the school’s acts of worship take Jesus and his teachings as their theme, but they are always prefaced by the qualification “some people believe that . . .”.

The SACRE’s Anglicans have no difficulty in endorsing this view of what constitutes a valid act of worship, but Paul Ferguson is not so happy about whether simply talking about Jesus’s teachings can make it a Christian one. “The heart of the Christian message is that of the Word made Flesh” he says, and insists that it means proclaiming the divinity of Christ. So the question remains whether it is enough just to say that some people believe that Christ was the son of God.

Rather than compromise, says the preceptor, schools with large numbers of children of other faiths should consider seeking a determination which enables them to provide an alternative to Christian worship, like the local primary his own children attend, where Muslims are in the majority. He is the chair of the governors.

No such problems of faith and doctrine are likely to divide the council when it meets within the Abbey precincts next term for its first sight of the borough’s new draft RE syllabus. Westminster is unusual in that its Agreed Syllabus Conference, which is in most places the SACRE wearing another hat, is an entirely separate body which has had little contact with the council.

When the conference was set up, belatedly, around 18 months ago, the borough’s then Tory leaders did little to hide their antipathy towards Rabbi Gryn and his colleagues. Education committee chairman Judith Warner refused to talk with the SACRE, despite repeated letters and phone calls asking for a meeting. And the conference she created was very different from Rabbi Gryn’s council.

To begin with, there were only three representatives allowed for the non-Anglican churches-Catholic, Orthodox, and non-conformist, and the same number for the non-Christian faiths, which meant there was no place for the Sikhs, let alone the Buddhists, the Bahai, or the Rastas. And the education commitee insisted that the three teacher representatives must pray, as well as live and work, within the borough, which ruled out most of Westminster’s teaching force.

Whatever ideas the right-wingers might have had about influencing religous education, the syllabus about to emerge is likely to be much the same as the SACRE’s teacher members would have produced. And it is unlikely now that City Hall will mind: Judith Warner has gone, having resigned following the district auditor’s report on Westminster’s “houses for votes” scandal, in which she was among those cited for surcharge. The new education leadership wants to be on good terms with its SACRE as well as its schools, and joint education chair Carolyn Keen attends the meetings.

It seems that Westminster’s syllabuses will be very detailed and prescriptive, more like the national curriculum than the guidelines produced in some other authorities. “This is one subject in which teachers want to be told exactly what to do. They are simply frightened of getting it wrong,” says Angela Wood, retiring chair of the National Association of SACRE and former Westminster RE inspector.