Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer Charles Moore writes in today’s Telegraph that Islamic faith schools should be more closely monitored than Christian ones. Mr Moore is also former editor of the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and the Spectator, and was chairman of think-tank Policy Exchange.

Ofsted has investigated some part-time independent Muslim schools and found them wanting. They were dirty and contained literature which was ”homophobic’’, anti-Semitic and hostile to women. In the jargon, such institutions are called ”out-of-school education settings’’. The Department for Education (DfE) wants them better registered and inspected.

A policy trap lurks here. On the one hand, I bet there are too many such Muslim schools offering low standards of education and high standards of bigotry. On the other hand, it is surely a good thing that people have the urge to set up their own schools among the poor, rather than leaving it all to the state. No doubt the Ragged Schools, which did such good work in the slums in the middle of the 19th century, would today be ticked off by Ofsted for failing to have good lavatories and for teaching the Bible without reference to other faiths.