Faith schools should no longer select children on the basis of their religion, a major new report recommends.

The two year study by the race-relations think tank the Runnymede Trust, provides a devastating critique of the role of faith schools in 21st century Britain, accusing many of having lost sight of their original historic mission to help the poor.

It concludes that faith schools educate a disproportionately small proportion of poor children, offer inadequate education about other religions and often display an “insular and absolutist” approach to the rest of society.

Rob Berkeley of the Runnymede Trust said the solution was not to get rid of faith schools, but to encourage them to end selection on the basis of religion, so they could work for the benefit of all of society.

“If faith schools are convinced of their relevance for society, then that should apply equally for all children. With state funding comes an obligation to be relevant and open to all citizens,” he said.

The report comes at a key point in the public debate about the role of faith schools in an increasingly secular and multicultural society. Ministers, who are concerned about distinct ethnic or religious communities living ‘parallel lives’ without ever mixing, have said that schools have a key part to play in promoting community cohesion.

The Churches in England were, after all, the first to provide free education for the poor in the early nineteenth century, long before the state got involved and England’s 6,900 faith schools still make up a third of the total school estate.

The Church of England has 4,657, followed by 2,053 Roman Catholic, 36 Jewish, 8 Muslim, 2 Sikh, one Hindu and around 82 other Christian schools.

The Schools Secretary Ed Balls has distanced himself from encouraging growth in the number of faith schools, but at the same time he has said that local communities should have the right to have them. His expansion of trust and academy schools ha s also made it easier for faith groups to get involved with education.

Last year, the Church of England committed to opening up all of its new schools to wider communities, but the Catholic Church agreed only to “consider the scope” for a similar move and no such commitment has been made by other faiths.

Mr Berkeley praised those faith schools that go out of their way to be inclusive of their local communities, adding that there were Church of England schools in the East End of London with an almost entirely Muslim intake.

But he noted that this inclusive approach was not universal. Only 11.4 per cent of pupils at primary faith schools, for example, are on free school meals, the shorthand for poverty, compared with 17.7 per cent in non-faith schools.

Steve Chalke, chief executive of Oasis Community Learning, which runs nine Christian Academies, said that none of his schools selected pupils by faith as that would be incompatible with the teachings of Jesus.

“You cannot be both a Christian school and a school only for Christians,” he said.

But Revd Janina Ainsworth, Chief Education Officer for the Church of England, disputed the report’s statistics and said that stopping selection on the basis of religion would be “deeply unpopular parents, and would do nothing to foster community cohesion.”

Jon Benjamin, director general of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said: “To take the successful model that is the faith school in this country, and to try to mould it into something that will effectively strip away precisely that which makes it successful, will do a huge disservice to this country and its young people,” he said.

Oona Stannard, chief executive of the Catholic Education Service of England and Wales, said that Catholic schools were actively promoting community cohesion. “If you go to a good cross-section of Catholic schools you will see that in evidence so I would be dumbfounded by any suggestion otherwise,” she said.

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