Three judges at the Court of Appeal will consider their case following a defeat at the High Court in London in August.

Mrs Maguire’s husband Don, children and nephews wanted Mr Justice Holroyde to order the decision taken by assistant West Yorkshire coroner Kevin McLoughlin to be reconsidered.

But the judge dismissed their application for judicial review.

The 61-year-old teacher was stabbed in the back by 15-year-old Will Cornick as she taught a Spanish class at Corpus Christi Catholic College in Leeds in April 2014.

The Pope led the tributes at the time of her death.

Cornick was later sentenced to life with a minimum term of 20 years.

An inquest into Mrs Maguire’s death is due to take place before a jury at Wakefield Coroner’s Court on November 13.

Mr Justice Holroyde said when he announced his decision: “I have much sympathy for the claimants, and I fully understand their reasons for wishing to pursue this line of inquiry.”

But he said he was “unable to accept the submission that the assistant coroner reached a decision which was so seriously flawed as to be… unreasonable”.

During the High Court hearing, counsel Nick Armstrong told the judge it was the only occasion on which a teacher had been killed by a pupil in a British classroom and the family were anxious “that all the lessons that can be learned from this enormous tragedy are learned”.

Yogi Amin, a partner at law firm Irwin Mitchell who represents Ann’s family, said: “This appeal represents the…

The daily slot on the Today programme on Radio 4, which features a religious person speaking for 2 minutes and 45 seconds, has been accused of being irrelevant to a mostly non-religious audience.

In an interview with the Radio Times, presenter John Humphrys said it was “deeply, deeply boring”.

He said: “Sometimes it’s good and the guy or woman is delivering an interesting thought in a provocative way.

“It seems to me inappropriate that Today should broadcast nearly three minutes of uninterrupted religion, given that rather more than half our population have no religion at all.”

Nicholls, who’s also the director of Affinity, a partnership of gospel-believing churches told Premier he sides with Humphrys.

He said: “I think it is a pretty boring slot.

“It’s dull because it’s kind of empty of anything cutting edge.

“It is difficult to compress to about two and a half minutes something that is meaningful and punchy”

Nicholls said that for non-Christian it just encourages people to be nice to each other and that even for Christians “it doesn’t really have a lot of bite to it normally, it’s fairly bland and fairly unchallenging and sometimes, even worse than that, it’s actually contradicting what the Christian message is.”

He concluded that he would like the segment to continue, but for the Christians invited on to think carefully about how listeners could actually be provoked to think about their life and about Jesus.

He also said he was happy for Atheists to be on…