With faith schools consistently dominating the top of the school league tables, it is little wonder that ministers wish to “bottle” the secret of their success or that middle-class parents are prepared to go to huge lengths to get their children into them.

A recent survey suggested that one in seven parents would be prepared to lie, in particular about their faith, to get their child into a good faith school.

While this may not be a problem for the lapsed faithful, for non-believers it is not an easy option. To secure a place in many oversubscribed faith schools, parents will be expected to go to Church, preferably with their children, every week for at least two years. And that is before the child has set foot in the premises.

Buying into the catchment area — an option that a majority of parents surveyed say they would consider — is not easy either as houses near the best schools can cost up to an extra £100,000.

Faith groups argue that the secret of their success lies in the fact that their pupils share a strong common ethos and culture, adding that this high degree of cohesion makes it easier to maintain discipline and to instil a culture of hard work.

There may be some truth in this but many fine mainstream comprehensives manage perfectly well on the discipline front without turning to God for help.

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.

When Rebecca Allen, of the Institute of Education, University of London, and Anne West, Professor of Education Policy at the London School of Economics, studied the intake of faith schools across London they found that religious schools in the capital were educating a smaller proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals (the rule-of-thumb indicator for poverty) than non-religious schools and that their intakes were “significantly more affluent” than the areas in which they were situated.

Separate research by the National Foundation for Educational Research found that foundation schools, voluntary-controlled (VC) and voluntary-aided (VA) schools, which include all faith schools, were the most socially selective, taking fewer children eligible for free meals and with special needs, but more bright 11-year-olds.

So although most faith schools were established to serve the poor, it seems that many no longer do this.

Faith schools have defended their intake, saying that comparisons with the surrounding community are unfair because they admit pupils from a wider area. This is true in many cases, although not all. It is also true that while competition for places at faith schools is fierce in some areas, most notably in the South East, there are plenty of faith schools in poor areas serving poor communities.

Fundamentally, however, this is not really an argument about faith. It is about numbers. Where demand for places in good schools outstrips supply, the problem will remain.

With effective monopolies, local authorities have little incentive to find solutions. They may take advantage of government proposals to make it easier to set up state-funded Muslim, Hindu or Jewish schools, but that is only a partial answer.

The Government’s main response to this issue has been to focus its efforts on the process of allocating places in individual schools, rather than on the supply of school places. Having been forced to retreat on plans to force new religious schools to take a quarter of their intake from pupils of other religions or those with no affiliation, it has now introduced a new admissions code that will ban faith schools from selecting by interview and increase transparency in admission criteria.

An alternative approach, advocated by the Policy Exchange think tank and the Conservative party among others, would be to increase the supply of good schools, by removing local authority constraints on the creation of new ones. The academies programme has gone some way to making this a reality. But even this has caused problems. Where new academies are faith schools and they are seen locally as the only good schools around, opponents claim that non-religious parents are being deprived of the opportunity to send their child to a secular school.

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