The Employment Appeal Tribunal, in the case of McNab v Glasgow City Council, accepted that the Education (Scotland) Acts empowered the Catholic Church to approve or disapprove of applicants for teaching posts in Catholic schools "in regard to their religious belief and character".

However, in another part of its judgment, the tribunal declared that a candidate for any post could be discriminated against in terms of religious belief only if a particular religious belief was "a genuine and determining occupational requirement" for the post and, moreover, that this exemption clause from the terms of the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003 could be invoked only by an employer who had a religious ethos. Since a public body, such as an education authority, could not be regarded as having a religious ethos, Glasgow City Council was deemed to have discriminated illegally against Mr McNab, who was awarded £2000 in damages.

So there is a conflict between two statutory provisions. Furthermore, since the provisions derive from legislation in two different parliaments, employment law being reserved to Westminster, there is no quick or easy means of resolving it. Policy statements by the Educational Institute of Scotland or pragmatic interventions by the Catholic hierarchy, for example by accepting non-Catholic teachers in Catholic schools for "non-sensitive" subjects or by allowing a non-Catholic to be appointed headteacher of two Catholic schools in the Borders, while welcome, do not get round the legal problem.

Sooner or later, an education authority, in the course of operating a non-discriminatory appointment process, will decide to appoint a non-Catholic to be headteacher of a Catholic secondary school. If the Catholic authorities refuse to accept the appointment, then it is the education authority and not the Church that will be the defendant in employment tribunal proceedings and will have to pay damages to the aggrieved applicant, probably far in excess of those that were awarded to Mr McNab.

The only short-term solution to the difficulty would be for the Scottish Parliament to legislate for denominational schools to be placed at arm's length from the education authorities along the lines of voluntary-aided schools in England, which have their own quasi- independent governors and raise a proportion of their running costs from denominational sources.

I suspect that this solution would be politically unacceptable in Scotland. So where do we go from here?

Fred Forrester, Dunfermline.