Amsterdam city council is to remove religious lessons from the list of extras the city council will fund for the city’s poorest children, alderman Arjan Vliegenthart has announced.

Last year the Parool newspaper reported that the council had spent €312,000 on religious lessons as part of its €11m fund to help children from poor families participate in society.

The fund is used to pay for ballet and music lessons and extra help with homework and last year, 2,500 families submitted bills for religious classes. Most of this went to Koran lessons, the paper said.

City councillors immediately voted to have the payments suspended and officials have since looked into the claims. Vliegenthart has now decided that although there were no irregularities and the city ‘is not financing jihadis’, religious classes will be excluded from the list of benefits.