Katharine Birbalsingh is back in the papers again. The head teacher at Michaela, a free school whose outstanding academic record and ultra-strict behaviour policy have made it a culture-wars lightning rod, tells the Sunday Times that she and her staff have been getting death threats ever since her board of governors imposed a policy banning any form of prayer on school grounds.

Until not all that long ago, the story runs, pupils were permitted to pray in the playground at break. This policy of tolerance worked fine for a bit, but only because none of the kids wanted to. It was a purely theoretical rule. But last March, a girl knelt on her blazer to pray during break time, and 30 other pupils joined her. Miss Birbalsingh says that at once, ‘the culture’ of the school changed. ‘We saw that Muslim kids who did not want to fast in Ramadan, did not want to pray or wear a hijab, were then intimidated into doing so. The lovely happy atmosphere in our school turned into something negative and scary.’

Like it or not, a ban on prayer in the playground adds up to a ban on Muslim prayer

On the face of it, a secular ethos in a secular school is exactly what we should be shooting for. Religious intimidation of the sort she describes is horrifying. And, of course, if the parents of pupils at the school aren’t happy with its secular policy they are quite within their rights to take their kids off to another school rather than insisting that the school change its policies to suit them. So two cheers, maybe as many as two and a half, to Katherine Birbalsingh on that front.

Miss Birbalsingh argues that by forbidding the outward exercise of religious difference at the school, she is able to promote integration between the different faith communities. The children won’t form into mutually uncommunicative tribes. And she says that she’s seen the results in action. After she implemented the ban, she boasts, Michaela went back to being ‘the lovely, happy school it was […] everything returned to normal. We were safe again.’ (Except, presumably, for the death threats and the legal action – but these are, I guess, what economists might call externalities.)

It seems surprising, I have to say, that a single child praying should have had such a rapid and dramatic effect on the whole tenor of the school community, and that a prohibition should have reversed the change so quickly and so thoroughly. It makes the onlooker wonder if there isn’t something a bit more febrile going on under all that lovely and happy. But we must take her word that that’s what happened.

She argues that a secular school environment should be a place where the writ of a child’s religious parents should not run. There’s merit to that argument too. She says, even-handedly, that she has no truck with Hindu parents who complain of their children eating from plates that might have touched an egg. She says she’s also seen off Jehovah’s Witnesses who didn’t like the school teaching Macbeth. She doesn’t say whether she’d expect Jewish kids to eat pork, though the logic of her position seems to imply she might. (I believe Michaela deftly dodges that one by serving a vegetarian menu.)

But the logic of her position seems to me a little shaky overall. And the existence of thugs who send death threats or throw bricks through windows isn’t in and of itself determinative of the underlying questions. The lines here aren’t as crisp as all that.

After all, the only prayer ban that can be meaningfully enforced in a school playground is a ban on the outward forms of prayer. You can suspend a young girl, if you want to, from kneeling on her blazer in a south-easterly direction. But you can’t stop a Christian inwardly communing with her creator, and even the most fervent secularist (which is to say, a believer in freedom of conscience rather than Stalinist state atheism) is not in the business of making windows into men’s souls. So, like it or not, a ban on prayer in the playground adds up to a ban on Muslim prayer: which is, like it or not, on the face of it discriminatory against the 50 per cent of the student body being raised in that faith. Which is, I’d suggest, why the policy is subject to legal challenge.

Moreover, the whole shebang looks a lot shakier when you consider what Miss Birbalsingh apparently considers a mainstay of the secular, ‘British values’ identity around which her multicultural charges are expected to rally. In the very same interview where she spoke of how vital it is to leave religion at the school gates, it was reported that Michaela students sing one of three songs in rotation every day in assembly. Those songs are ‘God Save The King’, ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘I Vow to Thee, My Country’.

To state the bleeding obvious, that strongly implies Miss Birbalsingh and her governors haven’t thought through what they mean by secularism much more deeply than the skin on a traditional British rice pudding. The clue that ‘God Save The King’ isn’t a strictly secular anthem comes in the first word. William Blake was a heretic, but he was a Christian heretic – and inasmuch as anyone knows what the hell ‘Jerusalem’ is on about, we know it takes its bearings from Christian scripture. As for ‘I Vow To Thee’ (which is an absolute banger, by the way) it is explicitly structured around a parallel between the earthly patriotism of the first three verses and the eschatological turn of the second three, in which our dewy-eyed chorus serves another King in ‘another country’ and, spoiler alert, it ain’t Saudi Arabia. It’s about as Christian a patriotic anthem as you could possibly imagine.

What’s sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander. Miss Birbalsingh’s courageous resistance to religious bullying is to be admired without qualification. And secularism is an admirable aspiration for a school to have. But the assumption that ‘British values’ are by default the Anglicanism of the established church isn’t secularism. It’s something else.