We'll be running a rota of weekend columnists to replace Faith Eckersall. This week Sam Shepherd on why schools should teach all children about all faiths and none.

“Mummy, you remember at Christmas, when King Herod didn’t kill Jesus?” said my four-year-old daughter from the back of car. “We did a singing assembly today and we sang some more about that.”

My daughter’s school is not a faith school. But they abide by the law which says that each day’s education must include an act of worship. Christmas is the first time she heard Jesus’s name, although there were plenty of references to God at Harvest Festival time.

“Do you know who God is?” I asked her then. “No Mummy,” she said.

We’re not a religious household, although her great-grandfather was a C of E canon and her great-grandmother from a line of fierce Welsh Methodists.

But neither are we evangelical atheists like Richard Dawkins. I want my children to learn the stories of the bible, and the stories that preceded them, and understand the cultural heritage that is behind the whole structure of our lives.

I want her to know what inspired C S Lewis and William Blake, Handel and Michelangelo. and why we celebrate Easter and Christmas.

But I also don’t want her to be taught – by the people who are also teaching her to read and write, people she respects and wants to please – that those stories are fact.

I want my children to learn about all religions. I want them to know why Muslims fast at Ramadan and why their calendar is different to ours. I want them to know why Jewish people celebrate Passover, why people meet at Stonehenge on the solstice, what Beltane and Yule are.

And I want them to be taught what science believes about the origins of the universe, to learn how to think for themselves and to make their own minds up about what they believe.

Education secretary Nicky Morgan insists that there is "no obligation for any school to give equal air time to the teaching of religious and non-religious views”. She’s wrong.

Children growing up today have so many things to contend with. Appalling terrorist atrocities, war, poverty, the dark places of the internet.

We live in a world where a woman walking to the shops to buy milk is considered to be “flaunting her shapely figure” and where body shaming is an integral part of the world’s best read news site.

We live in a world where a mainstream political candidate can all for the banning of an entire faith group from his country and people support him.

We live in a world where people fleeing a country where they are literally starving to death can be described as vermin and people agree.

So there’s every obligation to “give air time” to other beliefs. Being taught tolerance and respect for other people – regardless of their belief, size, sex, or nationality – that’s what children need.

By all means hold a daily Act of Worship. But include all faiths, not promote one as right above all others. That’s not what schools are for.