David Cameron appeared to express sympathy last week for parents who pretend to be religious in order to get their children into a decent school. Seemingly reluctant to criticise “middle-class parents with sharp elbows”, the Conservative leader said: “I think it’s good for parents who want the best for their kids. I don’t blame anyone who tries to get their children into a good school.”

He was doubtless preaching to the converted (as it were), since in middle-class circles, especially urban ones, faking religion for school admission purposes is as commonplace as organic chicken. That doesn’t mean it’s right.

From a parental point of view, I can understand the desire to send your child to what may be the only vaguely decent school for miles. Of course all schools would be vaguely decent if middle-class parents simply sent their children to the nearest state school - but I can see that, noble as this might be in theory, few of us are willing to gamble with our children’s education in the hope that said school will improve at some point, probably long after our children have left.

We then move on to plan B, which usually involves a sudden longing to go and sit on a pew of a Sunday morning. Do it for long enough - a year or so - and an obliging vicar is likely to come along and sign your form. Well done! Your repulsive hypocrisy means little Tarquin’s place is secure.

Repulsive hypocrisy or not, I can understand the parental impulse, to the point where I could conceivably live with being a repulsive hypocrite myself. What I find more difficult to comprehend is how religious bodies are comfortable with not only condoning said hypocrisy, but encouraging it. I’m no theologian - although I am, as it happens, fairly religious - but even a lay person can see with alarming clarity that encouraging people to be hypocrites is not what you’d call Christian. It is, in fact, a sin - according to all faiths.

Years ago, when I lived in academically disastrous Hackney, east London, and had two small children, I noticed from the league tables that the chart-toppers were Jewish schools. I knew that presenting myself to the local rabbi and saying, “If I pretend to be Jewish for 12 months, will you sign my admissions form?” would have been outrageous and offensive, no matter how interested I might be in Judaism. I wouldn’t have clocked the madrasah and offered the imam that kind of grotesque bargain either.

In the event I went trotting off to the Catholic school, was asked to go to mass more, failed to do so and ended up sending the children to private schools. Catholic schools are hardcore about church attendance and mea culpa - but at least I wasn’t being asked to do something I didn’t do in the first place (in my own dubious way: I go to mass occasionally because the Jesuits are within walking distance of my hairdressers and the other church is conveniently situated opposite Marks & Spencer).

School admissions forms are due in soon and here we are again. This time around I would like to send my little daughter, who has special needs, to the local state Church of England school. There is school apartheid where I live: all the middle-class kids go to this school and all the working-class kids go to the nonreligious other one, where they are joined by children whose English isn’t great, who are on the at-risk register and whose parents don’t necessarily have a wonderful, trouble-free quality of life. I wish I were a good and brave enough person to send my daughter there, but I’m not. The school is huge and my daughter is tiny and more fragile than most; the C of E school is small and many of her friends go there.

So I inform myself, write to the vicar and am told that, at this school, church attendance overrides all other entry criteria and that I have left it too late since, to ensure entry this September, we should have started going to church at the end of last summer. I am not C of E, and neither is my daughter or her father, but this is irrelevant.

The point is, we should have started pretending five months ago: we’ve left it too late. Is this not both insane and morally, shall we say, suspect? (My daughter’s special needs aren’t even mentioned, although they are clearly relevant.) Eventually – I am by this point running about in an almost constant state of rage at the uncharitable, unChristian wrong-headedness of the thing – the nice lady from the council points out that “specific medical needs” can, at the discretion of the governors, override everything. We have more specific medical needs than you’d know what to do with, so we might be okay: time will tell. Once again I am thankful not to be a poorly educated, broken-down person who just doesn’t have the strength to fight their corner.

Here is what I think about faith schools: if parents are willing to offer up their child to a religious institution in exchange for a superior education, that is enough. If you are a Protestant and willing for the Catholic school to indoctrinate your child into believing that transubstantiation is a fact of life, that what the Pope says goes, and that his or her parents will never make it to heaven because they are filthy sinners who have deviated from the One True Faith, that is enough.

If you are a Catholic and willing for the school to teach your child that the blameless Catherine of Aragon was not the devout virgin of the history books but a lascivious sort who’d had it away with Henry VIII’s brother and kept quiet about it, which meant Henry was entitled to run off with Anne Boleyn, so be it. If you are a diehard atheist and willing for your child to be taught either of the above (and the rest) - surely that is enough, too. What more does any church want? I’ll tell you: it wants and rewards monstrous hypocrisy. I find this repulsive.

There is only one way forward when it comes to education. Keep the faith schools but dump the specific entry criteria, on the understanding that handing over your child’s soul to religious educators is sacrifice enough. Make parents who don’t fancy a faith school send their children to the school that is closest to home with no loopholes and no wriggling room. That way you lose middle-class, or indeed working-class, ghettos. You raise children who are comfortable with human beings from all walks of life and inspire them to grow into unprejudiced adults who value compassion and don’t find differences frightening. Only then do you create schools that the good Lord might approve of.

Times Recommends

• Fragility always gets my sympathy vote
• Double it and you get the real jobless total
• Has al-Megrahi paid his council tax?