MARGO Grimshaw's comments on faith schools (LT, October 30) are way off the mark. Faith schools, I feel, are in general second to none at every level, academic and spiritual and for those reasons, oversubscribed.

From my knowledge of St Anne's Primary School, Blackburn, next to the THOMAS Project, there is a 20 per cent Muslim intake.

We have a well integrated, academically and spiritually sound school, where many parents of the Muslim faith happily send their children. They participate in the full spiritual and religious life of the school and this is no isolated exception.

For eight years I was chaplain to a Roman Catholic faith school and in the second most deprived borough in London, Newham. The school was a beacon of academic achievement, sporting prowess and drama. It also produced five priests and one bishop. The headmaster was knighted.

The idea of following the example of France as Margo suggests is ludicrous. France is one of the most secular countries in Europe and has demonstrated clearly how a country can be duped out of its Christian spiritual heritage and be taken in by the false gods of individualism, globalised consumerism and rampant relativism.

I say a very strong yes to faith schools.

The Roman Catholic Church finances its faith schools considerably, that's how serious the church is about this.

These are enlightened schools, open to the riches of other faiths and to people of no faith as well.

Margo suggests that people who want faith schools ought to pay for them. We do just that in the Roman Catholic community and it was the long term view of the Roman Catholic bishops of this country over the last 150 years that has given us today a fighting chance in a spiritually impoverished Britain, to pass on eternal and objective truths of faith in a contemporary and challenging way.

REV JOHN MICHAEL HANVEY, Clayton Street, Blackburn.