Schools without an enrolment scheme are required to accept all applications.

But do you want to hear something even I find weird. Local Authorities fund transport for Catholic kids to attend Catholic schools, but not for other religious kids to attend other religious schools. I used to think this was statutory, but its not! Camden doesn’t do it (though, surely, when the ILEA was abolished, Camden must have had a lot of Catholic kids).

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/pns/DisplayPN.cgi?pn_id=2009_0043

Well, let’s assume that parents have a free choice in which school they want their kids to attend, and let’s assume that some schools are believed to be better than others. Let’s also assume that parents are encouraged to believe that their beliefs can be grounded in evidence – and supplied with authoritative evidence to ground them in – so that parental rankings of good schools are likely to converge. Let’s also assume that people operate on the rule of 7 plus or minus 2, so it doesn’t really matter which schools are in the local top ten, because nobody is going to remember any more than the local top five.

How likely is it that a top-five school will ‘have places’?

The brochures we looked at three years ago put it slightly differently; they said they’d start by applying faith-based criteria, and take non-believers if they had places left at the end of the process. The criteria were ranked, like successively coarser filters; in the case of the RC school it was something like
1. Siblings.
2. Families who have the same priest as the Head.
3. Families whose priest the Head knows personally.
4. Families whose priest we’ve heard good things about.
5. Families whose priest we haven’t actually heard bad things about.
6. Other Roman Catholics.
7. High Anglicans.
8. Orthodox.
9. Low Anglicans.
10. Methodists, Baptists, Anabaptists, Quakers, Shakers, Muggletonians etc.
11. Heathens.

For the CofE church it was more like

1. Siblings
2. Anglicans.
3. Other church-attending Christians.
4. Other Christians who can remember being inside a church.
5. People who like the Nine Lessons and Carols and listen to Thought for the Day.
6. Believers in other religions (except Satanists).
7. Oh go on then, Satanists, as long as they take it seriously and don’t just do it for the sex and drugs.
8. People who aren’t into organised religion as such they’re more sort of spiritual you know?
9. Atheists (we like a jolly good argument!)
10. Other believers in any religion or none.

Seriously, the CofE school in our area definitely doesn’t exclude Jews (or believers in any other faith), and I’d be surprised if Adam’s did. But actually gaining admission does depend on the numbers.

Perhaps I’m being defensive – my parents stuck to their principles and sent me and my sister to the local bog-standard comp, and we did fine.

erm yes, this quasi-ethnic approach to religion (and the use of sectarian epithets) went rather out of fashion after the Good Friday agreement.

Not quite. If the school has places, it’s not allowed to discriminate (there are plenty of Muslim kids at my local CoE primary). If it’s oversubscribed, it’s allowed to use religious attendance as a criteria for allocating places. Apparently both the Catholic and CoE school near Adam are oversubscribed (though it should be noted that if they were secular schools, they would be just as oversubscribed and it would be someone else’s kid who had to go to the “not so good” school. As long as there are differences between quality of schools, this problem is going to exist; the fundamental problem is the inequality rather than the way it’s distributed).

My husband works in (state)teacher education and its hilarious watching all these good fresh faced standard English pagans (frequently prepared to go to fortune tellers etc. but not knowing why there are cows and sheep in attendence at christmas cribs) putting themselves through the catholic teachers certificate in order to be allowed to teach religion in catholic schools. As a good athiest lapsed catholic I have had great fun explaining transubstantion v consubstantiation and what the Immaculate Conception actually is only to discover that I have been dutifully repeated at assemblies. The opportunities for sabotage are obviousalthough I have not succumbed so far …

All fuelled by the Blessed Tony and his love fest with ‘faith’ schools (where did all this faith come from they used to be straightforwardly religious – nothing about what you believed you just were catholics (i.e. not ‘proddydogs’) when I was at school.

But in my day the catholic schools tended to be rougher and full of second generation Irish (with some progeny of Polish airmen). Now they have become much more attractive to the middle classes – thus conversions (or at least going back to your long lost roots). On the plus side the schools themselves (particularly primary schools) are frequently lovely caring places that you would be happy to send small people to unlike my early experiences of the sixties that gave you a useful if deeply frightening exposure to cruelty. This can run deep. My eighty year old mother gave a truly impressive performance in an amateur version of Once a cathlic as Sister Basil. I believe it was an accurate rendition of fond memories of the Presentation nuns in 1930s Ireland

There is no official separation of church and state in Britain. In fact, if you take a strict interpretation of things, Anglicanism is the official state religion of the UK.

Wait, what? The UK government runs schools that you’re not allowed to go to unless you say you’re Christian? Really? Man, that’s weird.