Four pupils have been suspended from a West Yorkshire secondary school after a copy of the Quran was damaged by students.

Wakefield’s Kettlethorpe High School caters to children aged 11-16 and offers a comprehensive admissions policy.

Wednesday’s incident happened when a copy of the Islamic text was brought in by a Year 10 pupil, the second oldest class of students.

Head teacher Tudor Griffiths said the book remained intact and there was “no malicious intent” from those involved.

He held a meeting with concerned community leaders on Friday.

Independent councillor for Wakefield East, Akef Akbar, called the meeting after being contacted by people calling for more information.

He said reports the Quran had been burnt or destroyed were untrue, and he had inspected the book himself during the meeting.

Mr Akbar said he had been told the book had been taken to school as a dare by a pupil who lost while playing a Call of Duty videogame with other students.

While at the school it sustained a slight tear to the cover and smears of dirt on some of the pages.

Almost €1 million has been spent by the HSE on advertising abortion in the first four years of the procedure being legal in Ireland, according to recent replies to parliamentary questions.

It was also revealed that the HSE has paid the money to the pro-choice MyOptions hotline.

In 2019, €434,754 was spent, while in the following years €149,177, €155,322, and €95,071 went towards the advertising and marketing strategies.

In response, Independent Deputy Carol Nolan said: “The fact that the HSE has incurred costs of almost €1m to advance the abortion agenda while leaving the promotion of positive life affirming alternatives to wither in silent media obscurity says it all. The message of death gets a government sponsored loudspeaker. The message of life is muzzled and muted. Where is the justice in that for unborn children and the women who are crying out for help to keep their babies?”

A new paper by a trio of academics bolsters the case that ‘deaths of despair’ stem in part from weakening social ties including a decline in religious participation.

It shows that mortality from these causes—drug overdoses, alcohol-related illness and suicides—among middle-aged white people in the US stopped falling around 1990, well before the dramatic rise in opioid use. The authors, Tyler Giles of Wellesley, Daniel Hungerman of Notre Dame and Tamar Oostrom of Ohio State, instead looked at religious services for an underlying cause.

They found that states with more religious participation had fewer deaths of despair, and that the faster religious attendance fell in a state, the more such deaths rose.

An earlier paper published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2020, showed that of 110,000 health workers, those who went to religious services were less likely to die from these causes.

A teacher may lose his licence to teach for, among other things, ‘misgendering’ a pupil.

The Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) has charged Joshua Sutcliffe, 32, of professional misconduct.

In 2017, he was suspended and placed in isolation for telling students “well done girls” while one of them wanted to be identified as a boy.

When the pupil became irate Sutcliffe sought to diffuse the situation and made an apology.

While the maths teacher does not believe it possible to change one’s biological sex, he said he tried to balance his beliefs with the need to treat the pupil sensitively.

He claimed he did this by avoiding the use of gender-specific pronouns and by referring to the pupil by name.

“While the suggestion that gender is fluid conflicts sharply with my Christian beliefs… I have never looked to impose my convictions on others”, he said.

Maya Forstater, who last year won a legal claim that she was unfairly discriminated against because of her gender-critical beliefs, gave evidence in support of Sutcliffe.

She argued schools should avoid implementing trans-affirming policies for students who identify as the opposite sex.

She also argued compelling students and teachers to use preferred pronouns for transgender pupils was asking them to “take part in a belief system” they might not agree with.

Last week, 22,000 Christians of all denominationals gathered together in India’s capital to demand better treatment.

India’s church is exhausted by the surge of anticonversion laws and accusations of illegal proselytisation. They’re tired of mobs driving out Christians from their villages and the possibility that many face property destruction and personal violence. Perhaps most significantly, they’re angry at a government that passively enables these actions at best and actively foments them at worst.

A lesson plan that would teach junior certificate pupils that ‘gender identity’ is “experienced along a spectrum” has been dropped after consultation with the public. Gender theory teaches that your ‘gender’ has no necessary connection to your biological sex.

The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) agreed to change a “learning outcome” in a draft for a new curriculum for social, personal and health education (SPHE), according to papers seen by The Sunday Times.

The original proposal aimed to help students “appreciate that sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression are core parts of human identity and that each is experienced along a spectrum”.

The final specification for the curriculum, which is yet to be published, references a wider range of characteristics as determinants of a pupil’s identity. It will no longer teach that gender identity and expression are on a spectrum.

A continuing decline in marriage has been recorded in the UK’s 2021 census figures, prompting a clash about whether to bolster the institution of marriage or enhance the status of cohabitation.

The biggest fall came among people aged 25 to 35, with 1.2 million more people unmarried in that age bracket than there were in 2011.

The slump has sparked fresh calls to protect rights for those not in legally registered partnerships, a move which would further blur the distinction between married couples and cohabitees.

The Marriage Foundation said the social pressure to marry in the UK had “pretty much disappeared”, despite “the psychology of marriage remaining deeply compelling”.

Harry Benson, the charity’s research director, argued that the process of making an active decision to be together tended to increase commitment and remove ambiguity, which was “one of the biggest relationship killers”. Getting married in front of your peers also creates “accountability”, he said.

But he said marriage was falling because it had come to be seen as optional.

He said government messaging often projected cohabitation and marriage as equal, while an “irresponsible marriage industry that claims the average cost of a wedding is £30,000” was deterring people. He also highlighted how the welfare system limited payments to married people.

“The decline of marriage is much less obvious among high income groups,” Benson said. “The miracle is that anyone in lower income groups marries at all with this huge couples penalty.”

The divestment of Catholic schools to other patron bodies must stop until the Government gives a guarantee that the State will not attempt to undermine the Catholic identity of remaining schools, leading education experts have warned. Then the handovers should be ramped up significantly, they say.

Professors Patrick Connolly, Eugene Duffy and Eamonn Conway say the “clock is ticking” for Catholic education because while the process of handing over some schools to State control drags on, calls for the “removal of all religious ethos from schools” are likely to grow.

However, to preserve a core of Church-run schools, they say that up to two-thirds of Catholic primary schools would need to be divested.

The Church has to negotiate a settlement to safeguard the future of Catholic education or else see its patronage “eroded” by legislation and curriculum changes, they warn.

To not do so would be “the worst of both worlds for the Church’s mission: in charge of Catholic schools but not in control, yet without a meaningful voice in their own schools,” warn the three influential academics.

Parents will still have the right to withdraw their children from sex education, Minister for Education Norma Foley has said. The Constitution recognises parents as the primary educators of their children. A new Relationships and Sexuality Education programme has been drafted for Junior Certificate children.

Ms Foley said: “I want to be clear around this: we operate in our schools a spirit of partnership with our parents, the wider section of stakeholders and partners within education. We retain within our schools parental consent at all times for parents to feel that they have freedom to withdraw their students from anything that is happening within a school environment.

“That is important. I know the value of that parental consent in schools, and I know the value of it in all other aspects of life.”

The Labour party has introduced a Bill to ban all single sex schools within 15 years regardless of parental wishes.

Labour spokesman Aodhán Ó Ríordáin claimed: “The fact that so many of our schools are still separated by gender sends the wrong message to children at a young age about gender equality”. About 30pc of Irish pupils are in single-sex schools.

“Ireland stands almost alone with our gender segregation system and we are out of kilter with the rest of the European world. While the conversation is rightly happening about the nature of gender equality in our society, education must be a feature of this”, he said.

“This Bill is about addressing the legacy of single gender schools and move to fully gender integrated schools within 10 years at primary level and 15 years at secondary level.

The Bill would see all State funding removed from any schools that don’t comply with mixed admissions.