Peter Vardy is wrong to say (“Lessons in survival”, 19 July) that the number of secondary-school pupils taking GCSE religious studies has declined. In the past decade, numbers have grown each and every year with an astonishing overall increase of 87 per cent (source: Joint Council for Qualifications). Two hundred and sixty-four thousand pupils took religious studies at GCSE last summer, representing something like a third of all pupils in Year 11. This is more than took separate biology, chemistry or physics, or geography or history. In Catholic schools the proportion is likely to be very much greater.There has been a similar growth at A Level with a 62 per cent increase over the past 10 years. Some 23,000 took the qualification last year.Whatever the reasons for a reduc