The Church of England’s new head of education has made comments supportive of teaching intelligent design (ID) in schools.

In an interview in the Times Educational Supplement last week, Mrs Jan Ainsworth said of ID: "While it is not something I would subscribe to, it is a recognition that there are different ways of looking at the evidence…you could do it in history of science."

On Friday a spokesman told the Daily Mail that Mrs Ainsworth was "simply representing the fact that some schools currently discuss intelligent design" and that "she does not propose to prevent them from doing so".

Yesterday, on the BBC Radio 4 'Sunday' programme Mrs Ainsworth was asked if she was “lending credibility” to Truth in Science. She replied:

I think it depends on what you think education’s for. I do think some people have a view in their minds that if children are told something they will automatically believe it. It depends very much how the material is used in the classroom. And if it is to explore and allow children to develop the capacities to explore different ways of finding out things, different ways of deciding which view is right then I don’t see any problem because you’re helping them develop critical methods, rational methods, which is after all the point of education.

A full transcript of the interview can be found here.

The Church of England is responsible for 4690 schools. Mrs Ainsworth told the Times Educational Supplement that she did not know how many of these were currently teaching ID.

It should be noted that Mrs Ainsworth’s views differ from the position of Truth in Science, as she sees the place of ID to be primarily in the religious education. In the science classroom, she considers its place to be in the history of science, because it is “pre-scientific”.

In contrast, TiS holds that the place of ID is in the science classroom, as a logical inference from scientific data. Mrs Ainsworth is mistaken in seeing ID as “pre-scientific” as it was widely held by the leading thinkers of the scientific revolution, and is the view of many scientists today.

Mrs Ainsworth’s views on the place of ID in schools are not dissimilar to those of the well-known science populariser Richard Dawkins. On 14 December 2006 in an interview shown on 'Dragon’s Eye', a BBC television programme on Welsh politics, Professor Dawkins said: “confine intelligent design to either the RE class or history of science.”

Despite this, Jan Ainsworth’s views have been criticised by the liberal think-tank Ekklesia (speaking to the TES), and the National Secular Society (speaking to the Guardian).