Read Ruth Gledhill's religion blog

New evidence that middle-class parents are playing the system to get their children into church schools emerged last night prompting calls for the Government to put a halt to new faith schools.

A surge in late baptisms into the Roman Catholic Church is reported by researchers as part of a phenomenon known as the “Year-Five Epiphany.” The findings have reignited the debate about the place of religion in the school system and led to renewed criticism that faith schools favour the selection of middle-class pupils whose parents know how to play the system.

Graham Allen, Labour MP for Nottingham North, said: “We need a national debate about whether we really want to continue down the road of faith schools.”

He and other Labour MPs fear that the spread of such schools undermines community cohesion and entrenches disadvantage. Their unease will intensify today as new research suggests that parents are playing the religion card to get their children into the country’s top faith schools.

“Faith schools at the moment are mainly Protestant or Catholic,” he said. Other faiths “quite rightly” wanted similar provision. “In an era when we are desperate for social cohesion, do we really want to sustain the current level of discrimination between people of different faiths, particularly when taxpayers are paying for it?”

He and John Austin, a backbench Labour MP, had attended a private meeting with Ed Balls, the Children’s Secretary, to ask him to re-examine the future of faith schools.

Mr Austin, MP for Erith and Thamesmead, described the sudden trend for later baptisms as “quite alarming”. “I believe it is an abuse of the human rights of the child to use them in this way. Parents will use all sorts of mechanisms to try to get their children into particular schools. The middle classes move home, change their religion or inflict their religion on their children for that purpose,” he said.

The Catholic Church defended last night its policy of defining Catholics by baptism and said that even where suspicions existed about parental motives, “it is not easy to remain a Catholic for long if you are not authentic”.

The Church added: “Independent data from Ofsted shows that students in Catholic schools do better in terms of behaviour, social, moral and spiritual development and parental involvement in the school.”

The report by the Pastoral Research Centre Trust uses statistics supplied by the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales about every aspect of the Church’s mission in Britain since the 1950s. It shows decline in almost every significant area of Church life except late baptisms.

In the Catholic Church in England and Wales, baptisms of children aged over 1 made up 5.4 per cent of total entry into the Church in 1958, but by 2005 this figure had risen to nearly a third, or 30.3 per cent in 2005, a total of 20,141. By contrast, traditional “cradle” baptisms of babies under 1 year old fell from 85 per cent of entry into the Church to 64 per cent. The research also indicated that as the unbaptised children got older and began to enter the school system, parents would stop at little to secure for them the best education they could.

The Church of England has also witnessed an increase in late baptisms. There were 35,000 baptisms of children aged over 1 in the Church of England in 1990, compared with 39,000 in 2005.

Mr Balls was reported to have broken with Tony Blair’s support for faith schools when he told MPs this week that the current administration was not ideologically committed to their spread.

Mr Balls was giving evidence to the Commons Education and Skills Committee, which has expressed concern at the effects on community cohesion.

However, he has said recently that the Government was to make it easier for more state-funded faith schools to be set up.

Although faith schools often boast superior academic results, critics claim that they can be socially divisive and that they operate against the new statutory duty upon schools to promote community cohesion. The National Union of Teachers has said the selection criteria of many faith schools discriminates against pupils from non-religious backgrounds.

There are 1,855 primary and 393 secondary Catholic schools in England and Wales. In England alone there are a further 4,468 Church of England primary schools, 26 Methodist, 29 Jewish, three Muslim and one Sikh, plus 201 Church of England secondary schools, seven Jewish, two Muslim and one Sikh.