It is inherently dishonest, and immoral, to be irreligious for six days a week but to pretend to be faithful on the seventh in the hope that your children will thereby procure a better education. Securing a place at a good school may increase the chances of your child enjoying a fulfilling adult life. But such success, if it comes, will have an indecent and nefarious hole at its heart.

That said, faith schools are a good thing. A little fibbing is worth tolerating as the price of allowing faith schools to provide the above-average educational service that they often do. Treatment of the problem, such as it is, would surely do more harm than good.

We learn today of an increase in the number of Roman Catholic baptisms among toddlers approaching school age, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the “Year Five Epiphany”. 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. It is assumed that these christenings occur so that scheming parents can tick a box on a Roman Catholic school application form, and gain admission to a good school. Just as it would be naive to assume that all these christenings are taking place for good, religious reasons, it would also be misleading to assume that church and school authorities are not aware of skulduggery. Hence the attendance at church services. Heavily oversubscribed Roman Catholic schools, for instance, do not just demand that would-be pupils are baptised, they demand also that the date of baptism matches what would be expected of the genuinely devout. If your child is not christened in his or her first year, you may have explaining to do.

Religion, the church in particular, has always combined spiritual inspiration and social service provision. People come to churches and to other religious organisations for many things. They come in search of alms, shelter, care, community, and also for education. Some of them knowingly leave their agnosticism - even their atheism - at the door and never find God. Others arrive for similarly practical reasons but discover an appetite within themselves for an engagement with a moral code. Others still “find God”. A modern society should be as relaxed about encouraging atheists to promote their ideas as organised religions to market their services.

Faith schools, and the religious foundations that help to support them, should not restrict access to the offspring of proficient box-tickers. If they do, they will merely create more box-tickers, will fail in their duty to wisely spend taxpayers' cash set aside for education and will attract brickbats. The religious credentials of children and parents, as far as they are relevant, should be judged by individual schools. By restricting access, schools may also find themselves forever preaching to the converted. But nor should faith schools' freedoms be restricted in the pursuit of common denominators.

Immoral tactics leave a sour taste. But by hook, or perhaps by crook, faith schools set enviable standards. Faith schools bring diversity and widen choice. Faith schools are good for children and good for parents. They are also good for faith-less schools since they create competition which, by and large, is healthy.