Schools admissions are a real source of anxiety for parents. I should know – I am one, and one living on the edge of London’s ever more over-populated sprawl.

It’s now clear that many local authorities are behind the place-planning curve. The rhetoric of parental choice sounds hollow, since – like the first flushes of capitalism in the old communist bloc – choice doesn’t mean a lot when the shelves are ever barer. We all want the best education for our children, but on the way to that unlikely nirvana the least we can ask for is application and allocation processes which are as simple, equitable and non-anxiety producing as possible. I’d be right behind any move to ensure this system works as well as possible for people regardless of race, age, religion or social status.

What we need is a campaign which will bring together a range of stakeholders, as well as parents who have been poorly served by the system, to work for a clearer and farer system – not least to push government to work harder at matching supply to demand. We could call it the Fair Admissions Campaign. Hold on! Its already exists? Thank God! 

But wait… here’s a question: when is a Fair Admissions Campaign not a Fair Admissions Campaign? Answer: when it’s a campaign which is only tangentially about fair admissions, and is primarily a campaign against faith-based selection criteria, motivated ultimately by a desire to harry faith schools in general and on principle. Or, when it gives the impression that religiously selective schools are the only ones in breach of the School Admissions Code, or even that all of the breaches in these schools were around religious selection criteria. In other words, it’s not a fair admissions campaign when it’s an exercise in astroturfing by the British Humanist Association.

This is the ‘Fair Admissions Campaign’ which today released a report, “An Unholy Mess: How virtually all religiously selective state schools in England are breaking the law”.

Now, I’m not one to pick holes in methodology and, indeed, it seems that there are many in breach of the Code in many and various ways. There’s a long way to travel between the number crunching behind the report and the BHA’s claim that “the number of children who are unfairly losing out on places is significant”, still less to the lurid headline "faith schools illegally denying places to many children". The BHA identified some 70 schools with religious selection criteria in local authorities beginning with ‘B’ (alleging that 69 were breach the Code in some way). It referred what it thought were the 43 worst offenders to the Office of the School Adjudicator for inspection, with an extra five schools they don’t seem to like for good measure.

The report has indeed uncovered a number of breaches of the Schools Admissions Code, but the trick has been in inflating the seriousness of those breached. Let's leave aside the question of whether its legitimate to draw conclusions about all religiously selecting schools on the basis of a pre-filtered group of worst offenders, or whether it's legitimate to draw any conclusions at all without a control group of non-religiously selecting schools. When you look at the BHA's data, it seems that the reported 1,300 breaches actually can also be expressed as 48 schools breaching the code in 90 ways, though many on multiple occasions. Some of the breaches are indeed serious, but a large number are minor and administrative in nature. The OSA found that 47 of the 48 schools referred to them by the Fair Admissions Campaign had admissions procedures which were in some way ‘unclear’, but only 14 of the 48 were found to have procedures which were either unfair or not objective, and just one was found to have procedures which disadvantaged socio-economic groups.

So, what do we have here? Procedures in need of improvement and oversight? Of course. Schools in need of support? No doubt. Occasional examples of where religious selection criteria are locally resulting in disadvantage for already disadvantaged groups? Absolutely.

A system where large numbers of children miss out on school places? I doubt it – certainly, this report doesn’t demonstrate that. The agenda of this report is nothing to do with protesting infringements of the schools admissions code, as the BHA well knows (why else would the report call for an end to religious selection criteria tout court). But then there's an issue of principle on which the ‘Fair Admissions Campaign’ might show its hand – it's not as if they’d be satisfied if every religiously selecting school in the land were fully compliant with the Schools Admissions Code, only when there is no religious selection whatsoever. That case is far harder to make. 

Faith-based selection criteria can result in distortions. I can go with Fair Admissions Campaign when it comes to the spirit of the law, but this Pharasaical pursuit of the letter, with the clear objective of discomforting the position of faith schools per se, is both entirely predictable and completely wrong headed. The faith sector is now a non-negotiable in creating enough places to meet increased requirements, and anyone who thinks that creating places worth having is just about throwing up buildings and recruiting more teachers knows less about education than the average parent who pays any kind of attention to how schools flourish and how they don’t.

I personally have real reservations – not least theological reservations – about religious selection criteria in Christian Schools, particularly Church of England schools. I can see the other side of the argument when it comes to Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and to an extent Catholic schools. Let’s not kid ourselves, though – this is another attempt to farm parental frustrations about the competition for schools places and bring them to bear on religious selection criteria that apply, in varying degrees, in about 1 in every 5 secondary schools, while ignoring the real cause of unfairness - the growing pressure on the number of available places.

Paul Bickley is the Director of Political Programme for Theos

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Image by Christopher Sessums under Creative Commons 2.0.