Do not let the religious schools get a grip on the taxpayers purse, like what has happened in Australia. The frmer Prime Minister Howard took it to great lengths, to get votes.

margie, victoria, australia

Faith is for those who are not capable of thinking and reasoning.

Faith schools should certainly not be subsidised by taxpayers, 90% of whom are non believers.

m wilson, bidache, france

Is nt it noteworthy that the Blairs chose to send their children across London to The Oratory which just happens to be a top performing Catholic faith school ? It makes you wonder how many more Labour MPs say one thing but do the opposite for their own children.
Perhaps, we the very hard-pressed taxpayers should be told.

Richard, London, England

It's clear that demand for faith based schools exceeds supply. The solution of some Labour MPs is to remove the demand by abolishing faith schools. And they say socialism is dead!

Cary, London,

Now that Tony Blair is now longer their leader and his sons have left one of the most selective faith schools in London
I suppose the Labour party feels free to turn it's tentacles on one of the remaining bright spots of English education.
Do they not ask way employers are prefering to recruit young people educated in Poland, which has a strong religious tradition, rather than our own?
With only a couple of years to go before the Labour Party are kicked out (hopefully for a long, long time) you would think they would stop their incessant meddeling and try to appear less loathsome.

Janet, New Canaan, USA

I am moving to the Hove area with my three children and I find it absolutely disgusting that between the RC and the CofE schools I am unable to find a place at a local primary school for them there, unchristened little heathen that they are. I apparently am obliged to go out of my immediate area.

I am in favour of banning all state funding for religious schools . If churches want to self fund, then fair enough, but why should I, as a tax payer, not have access to a local school (ie within walking distance for a four year old) because my family is being discrimated against for having no religious beliefs.

Kate, Hove, UK

It would be better if policy makers interpreted the results of the survey that 'suggested that one in seven parents would .. lie to get their child into a good faith school' as 'suggested that one in seven parents would .. lie to keep their children out of the other schools in the area.'

Peter, Sittingbourne,

"There is now a growing body of evidence to suggest that faith schools succeed by “cherry picking” children from affluent families that are more likely to offer the kind of support at home that will help a child to succeed at school."
Might it not be that those parents who build their lives and their families on Biblical Christian principles are actually consequently less likely to succumb to the sirens of consumer greed and become over indebted; are more likely to believe in the value of self discipline and the ethos of hard work; and are more likely to create stable, balanced, loving home environments in which children flourish?
Or can a secular socialist government not even begin to contemplate such an idea?

jan, herne,

So people will lie and perpetuate a lie, what a sad reflection on British parents.

Monty, Oxford,

If Humanists think that their atheistic humanism is so wonderful, why don't they simply do what Catholics, Anglicans and Jews have done? Why don't they simply set up their own schools to educate those children whom they want to be atheistic humanists.

Many Church schools were originally set up independently: pre-1948 on Friday afternoons in some Liverpool schools the parish priest would come round with the teachers' wages for the week, and if the church collection had been meagre, the wages were lower.

Sorry, is atheistic humanism a belief not worth the sacrifice? Far be it from me to suggest that atheistic humanists too selfish to actually make the sacrifice which Christian and Jewish believers make?

Whatever the cause, the Humanists should stop whinging and do something positive.

Francis Marsden, Chorley, Lancs

The difficulties faced by the non-religious are severe - the British Humanist Association is constantly asked for help by parents either forced unwillingly to send children to faith schools because nothing else is available or refused places at their local school because it is a faith school & the Humanists have been making the case about social selection for years.

It is all very well to say the solution is to make all schools better - like, how? Meantime we need to solve the specific problems caused by faith schools (social division, ethnic division, religious division, religious indoctrination at public expense, employment discrimination against non-believers, etc.).

The Humanists' answer (see www.humanism.org.uk) is that faith school privileges - exemptions from anti-discrimination law & from the national framework for RE - should be steadily eroded so that they are assimilated to the mainstream, leaving it to parents to induct their children into a religion if they will.

David Pollock, London,

It seems that the only solution, in the current educational setup, is to pretend that you're superstitious and then claim that you deserve special treatment, and your own schools. This obviously can't be right.

ALL state schools should be treated equally, financed equally, and of a secular nature. Rather than the covert selection that goes on at present, we should be open and honest about this with either streaming within schools, or the reintroduction of grammar schools which could admit purely on the basis of the childs ability - not the parent's social standing or ability/willingness to play the system.

Mark Allen, Nottingham,

The simplest question to ask here doesn't revolve around the the efforts made by the so called " affluent families" to get their children into the best school they can find or the willingness of schools to choose those children deemed to do better because their " affluent familiy" are more willing to support their children in school. Rather, we should be asking why some families very clearly do not care for education or about the successes or failures of the children in education. If parents are not interested or supportive of their children in school then nothing is going to improve those children's chances. Repeated ideological dogmas have done nothing to improve education.

David Evans, Rotherham, South Yorkshire

Why is it a surprise, or require supernatural belief, to understand why schools who can select pupils get good results? The problem children and those whose parents don't care (often the same thing) go, by default, to the local state school, while the local faith school offers an attractive deal to parents, "come to church, boost our numbers, fill our collection plates, volunteer your time and if you make sufficient effort your children can be schooled with those of other like minded parents also willing to play the game for their children's education". Clearly those parents who have made such an effort (such as my previously atheistic brother in law, now a deacon) will show a continuing interest in their children's education financially and more importantly because they WILL care if their children are truanting, WILL care if they are disruptive and WILL care that they do their homework.

Meanwhile the local state school has to pick up all the other kids, good, bad and uninterested.

PJ, Chinnor, Oxon