LIBERAL Democrat education spokesman Phil Willis may be seen as the arch enemy of faith schools, but he is actually deeply religious.

Mr Willis discussed his faith with The TES on a visit to Liverpool schools. And he was so impressed by the ethos of a multi-faith primary school he visited, that one little girl could find her words in Hansard. “There are lots of different religions, but we all work together,” she told him.

“I shall tell that to the House of Commons in my speech next week,” he replied.

Mr Willis and Labour MP Frank Dobson will be introducing a new clause at the report stage of the new education Bill requiring all faith schools to have a quota of students of other faiths or none.

But, while Mr Willis is strongly opposed to any increase in singlefaith schools, he does not feel it is imperative to abolish them altogether. “I am not one of the secularisers like Frank Dobson. I have no objection to schools being run by faiths, but I do object to them being run for faiths. They should not be allowed to be exclusive to those children or parents who have or purport to have faith.”

He especially wants to see the end of the “obscenity” of parents going to church simply to ensure their child’s place. “That is not what faith is about.”

Mr Willis has thought a great deal about faith, having found his own belief, relatively late in life. His Irish mother was a devout Catholic who met his father, also a Catholic, at his local church in Burnley when she came over to England as a nurse. They brought their two sons up in the faith, until Phil’s mother died of cancer when he was 13. “My father wanted my mother to have a Catholic burial but at the funeral he fell out with the priest over the fee. He vowed never to set foot in a Catholic church again, and he never did.”

The MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough said he drifted into agnosticism until he started teaching at Primrose Hill high in the poor Chapeltown district of Leeds in 1967. The head, Laurie Lowton, was an evangelical Christian who translated his faith into practical help for the community.

Mr Willis said: “The work of this man had a profound effect on me. Until 1970 I had a job, but I then felt I had a vocation to work with young people who had not been blessed with the opportunities I had had. It wasn’t a blinding flash but a realisation that I had a mission which I took to every school I worked in afterwards.”

But Mr Willis did not return to the Catholic church. His wife Heather, a special needs teacher, is a Methodist, and while their two children, Rachel, now 26 and Michael, 22, were growing up, the family went to the Methodist church in their home village of Rufforth, near York.

Now Willis favours a pick-and-mix approach: “I enjoy the Free Church, but I am happy to worship anywhere. I don’t believe instructing children in one particular methodology brings them to faith at all. And I don’t believe you have to have a single-faith school to exercise your faith or instil a value system.”

He liked what he saw in Liverpool. Its gleaming new Kingsley primary, with its ‘Muslim ethos’, shines out of a landscape of derelict buildings in Toxteth. More than half the pupils are Muslims - mainly from the local Somali and Yemeni communities - and in acknowledgement of this the school keeps a Halal kitchen, has a prayer room and juggles Baker days to fit in with the Islamic calendar.

Far from feeling threatened by this, parents of non-Muslim children are queuing up to get their children in. It is this kind of atmosphere that Mr Willis would like to see in all religious schools.