Protests outside a school where pupils were shown a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad are "deeply unsettling", a government minister has said.
Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said teachers should be able to "appropriately show images of the prophet" in class.
Protests have been staged outside Batley Grammar School, where a teacher has been suspended.
The West Yorkshire school has apologised "unequivocally".
Head teacher Gary Kibble said the member of staff had been suspended since the image was used in a lesson on Monday.
As demonstrations resumed for a second day, the school is understood to have switched to a day of remote learning.
Mr Jenrick called for the "deeply unsettling" scenes outside to "come to an end".
"In a free society we want religions to be taught to children and for children to be able to question and query them," he told the BBC.
"We must see teachers protected and no-one should be feeling intimidated or threatened as they go into school.
"And the scenes that I have seen yesterday and this morning in Batley are deeply unsettling."
Protesters had demanded the teacher's sacking, while some parents who spoke to the BBC said they didn't agree with the demonstrations and found them "intimidating".
As a crowd gathered on Friday, one protester read out a statement at the school gates.
He said the group "do not accept that the school has taken this issue seriously, given that it's taken them four days to merely suspend only one of the teachers involved".
Another protester, who gave his name only as Mr Hussain, told the PA news agency he was a parent at the school and said: "We would not like any form of extremism, any extremist viewpoints, to be taught to children."
Former Conservative Party chairwoman Baroness Warsi said the debate has been hijacked by "extremists on both sides" to fuel a "culture war" at the expense of "kids and their learning".
She told the BBC she had spoken to pupils and parents over the last 24 hours and "that many pupils were left distressed because of what happened".
Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme, she said: "It's about safeguarding children and making sure the school look again, as should every school, to ensure that every pupil in their school is being taught in a way which creates a positive, unifying learning environment."
West Yorkshire Police said no arrests had been made and officers remained at the school.
Parts of the Koran are taken to mean that neither Allah nor Muhammad can be captured in an image by human hand and any attempt to do so is seen as an insult.
Head teacher Mr Kibble said the teacher had "given their most sincere apologies" and been suspended pending an investigation.
In a statement on Thursday, the Department for Education said it was "never acceptable to threaten or intimidate teachers" and that they encouraged dialogue between schools and parents when issues emerged.
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2021-03-26 13:11:56Z
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