Proposals to force faith schools across England to accept intake from other faiths and those of no faith have been abandoned, Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary has reported.
Explaining the decision, Johnson was quoted as saying that new legislation to implement those proposals were now unnecessary following the Roman Catholic Church's decision to also allocate a quarter of all its places to non-Catholic students.
Controversy was sparked across faith schools when the proposals were made public last week in an amendment to the Education and Inspections Bill. The government had told that schools should be used to ease problems with social division.
However, in a U-turn on Thursday, Johnson stated that the proposed laws were no longer necessary.
The Church of England had previously said that all of its new schools would implement measures to voluntarily accept up to 25 per cent of its pupils from those of other faiths.
Johnson declared that a consensus had been reached among all faith groups that every "school whether faith or non-faith should have a duty to promote community cohesion".
It has been decided that Ofsted would act as a body to verify that this was being carried out in the schools.
Johnson said, "What we have found in dialogue with the Muslim schools, for instance, is they have a policy where they want between 20 per cent and 25 per cent of pupils to be from outside of the Muslim faith.
"They make the point that very few people want to take them up and they say that's about misconceptions about Muslim schools."
He added, "We've made enough progress through the voluntary route that we don't need the blunt instrument of legislation."
Conservative Party Schools Minister, Nick Gibbs, welcomed the move, saying that the opposition party had always felt that the issue should be one that schools could decide on by themselves.
Gibbs told the BBC, "You should encourage schools to engage on the basis of social responsibility by opening up places, by involving themselves in the community, but not by passing draconian laws forcing schools to adopt a quota of pupils from non-faiths or from other faiths."
