Today it has been revealed that our outgoing Prime Minister is leaving us a hanging stink bomb in the proverbial air - the Church taking control of 100 City Academies. Gee, great. So with a new Prime Minister with an avowedly Christian "moral compass" and the Conservatives pledging to expand the Academies programme once in power, it looks like we're saved if we do, saved if we don't.

Faith schools may have a reputation for academic excellence, but at what cost? Parents will do anything to get their children a good education, we all know that, but in my opinion the faith element is neither here nor there. It's the funding and support, not the ethics, that makes faith schools so good and makes parents so eager to enroll their kids. The discipline found in them can certainly be replicated without the dimension of morning sermons. Indeed, if Tony Blair was leaving us with 200 new City Academies funded by Tesco Academies Services Ltd, they would be just as good (actually I'd rather have a generation of compulsive shoppers than religious fundamentalists come out of this scheme... though maybe that's just me).

Of course I have little objection to privately funded faith schools on a libertarian principle. If the demand is there, it should be an option with the proviso that there remains some standardised curriculum control. I simply disagree that state-run schools should be allowed to be "bought" by the highest bidder - too often those with a vested interest in warping the minds of children - and then funded by the taxpayer forevermore. If the Church wants to run schools, it should do so entirely out of its own pocket. If rich old evangelical fundamentalists want to buy schools and to teach creationism in them, why on earth should we be both facilitating them and then footing the bill?

Tony Blair has a lot to answer for. And if the Conservatives carry on this ludicrous angle to the scheme, so will we.