Ghada Mohamed, from the local religious group, said that she hoped it would combat a rise in 'Islamophobia'

Saturday 10 August - School children across Lincolnshire will be asked to wear a hijab for a day in a bid to fight discrimination.

Lincoln Muslim Sisters are in talks with schools from across the county to organise a day in November 2019 or February 2020.

Ghada Mohamed, from the local religious group, said that she hoped it would combat a rise in 'Islamophobia'.

She is hoping that if the day is successful then it could become an annual tradition in Lincolnshire.

'Each of the pupils will be able to make a choice as to whether they want to go into school wearing a hijab,' Ghada told The Lincolnite.

'When we actually go into schools and have conversations with pupils there’s a much lower chance of discrimination'.

'It’s not just about Muslim people. We hope that this will break down barriers and reduce the abuse of all minority groups.'

The religious group said that it can either provide hijabs for schools or pupils could go choose to purchase their own.

Statistics released by the Home Office revealed that religious hate crime had risen by 40% to over 94,000 offences. The report covered April 2017 to March 2018 and more than half of those crimes were directed at Muslims.

It is partly because of improvements in the way crimes are reported, but there have also been spikes of hate crime after events like the Brexit referendum and the terror attacks last year.

People's experience of hate crime, captured in the Crime Survey of England and Wales, has gone down steadily in the last 10 years.

The Home Office report said the large increases in police recorded hate crime "may suggest that increases are due to the improvements made by the police into their identification and recording of hate crime offences and more people coming forward to report these crimes rather than a genuine increase".

And one quirk of the figures is that a single hate crime offence can be recorded more than once if it is deemed to have multiple motivations - for example, if an individual feels that they were targeted because of their race and their religion.

Author's comment: Statistics can be misleading. The year-on-year figure actually rose by 40%, from 5,949 in 2016-17 to 8,336 in 2017-18, while the 94,000 figure quoted was over a seven-year period from 2012. This inaccurate presentation of the figures has the fingerprints of the mendacious mountebanks of 'Tell Mama' all over it.