Your report on the advantaged intakes enjoyed by many church schools is a welcome reminder that the Holy Spirit is unlikely to be the cause of their superior academic performance (Poor pupils less likely to attend church schools in England than rich neighbours, 6 March). However, the response of your leading article (6 March) – that the figures point to "pausing for thought" – is somewhat pusillanimous, to say the least.
What holds good for church schools holds good for all schools: educational outcomes primarily reflect the socio-economic makeup of the pupil intake and, in a system as hierarchical as ours, it takes either extraordinary talent or extraordinary incompetence for a school to prove an exception to this rule. The mulish insistence by politicians that school intakes do not matter and that "great leadership" and "inspiring teaching" are all that is missing from the lives of the poor flies in the face of all evidence and is a dishonest attempt to avoid confronting powerful minorities in order to promote the common good.
What that common good might be we can see in those education systems across the world, from Alberta to Shanghai, whose pupils leave our own for dead in international comparisons. Sadly, rather than learn from these examples, we have chosen to import failed models from Sweden and the US. Of course, by the time it becomes apparent that this policy has failed, our log-rolling secretary of state will have moved on and his successor will blame the teachers.
Michael Pyke
Campaign for State Education
• The final case study in your piece on church schools seems to me rather to undermine the argument of the rest of your coverage. Thorner CofE primary school, as the piece points out, is a voluntary-controlled school. This means that it uses the same criteria for admissions as a local authority school, usually things like siblings and distance from the school. Voluntary-controlled schools cannot use faith or church attendance as admission or oversubscription criteria.
If Thorner's intake is wealthier than the surrounding postcode area, it is not because of faith-based selection by the school, but the result of selection by the parents who have chosen to apply for places there. Whatever one thinks of faith-based admission criteria (and personally I would love to see the back of this practice), it's not what is happening here. More nuanced research is needed in order to tease out what is going on.
Rev Anne Le Bas
Seal, Kent
• So church schools allegedly discriminate against the poor based on the dubious premise that, if the number of pupils receiving free school meals is low, this must mean that the majority of pupils come from "well-heeled" families. This ignores the fact that not all those who could benefit from free school meals qualify for them and families with a similar income who are not eligible are worse-off because they have to pay for meals. Then there are families who do not claim free school meals because of the stigmatising effect on their children; one of the reasons why the Child Poverty Action Group has called for all children to receive free school meals.
Do you believe that if all schools were to become secular overnight, the problem of pushy parents trying to get their offspring into good schools would disappear? There are plenty of non-church schools that are equally oversubscribed by middle-class applicants and if, as the Church of England points out, local authorities manage the admissions in more that half of its schools then that hardly amounts to cherry-picking.
Barry Wadeson
Milton Keynes
• If the social profile of church schools in deprived areas includes more rich pupils than that of their immediate neighbourhood, this is because the churches have created schools on council estates to which the middle classes are prepared to send their children. I am surprised that organisations concerned about class divisions do not regard this as a commendable. It is certainly better than the situation in Bristol where even people living on council estates cannot be persuaded to send their children to the secondary schools on those estates.
John Hall
Stoke Bishop, Bristol
• As a retired deputy headteacher of a large Catholic comprehensive school and currently a governor of a small Catholic primary school (both having within their catchment areas postcodes recognised as being of significant social deprivation), I can confirm that in both establishments the number of pupils on free school meals (FSM) is well above national averages.
Also it would be of statistical interest to analyse the remaining faith schools as to what their proportion of pupils were on FSM (ie in the Catholic sector: 23.7% at secondary level and 35.3% at primary) and comparing these with the remainder.
Bogumit Polachowski
Wirral, Merseyside
• Although your article mentions the fact that the state-funded Muslim schools have "more than the local authority average of free school meal pupils", not surprisingly the poor showing of church-run schools is used by the British Humanist Association (BHA) to call for "the government to end faith-based selection in all state-funded schools". One has to assume that the BHA's intention is to end what it sees as "inequality" and yet, in its zeal to make all schools secular, they would do away with parental choice for those of us who believe that faith does indeed have an important role to play in education. That's hardly equality by any stretch of the imagination. I have no wish to impose faith schools on every Muslim parent, let alone those of other and no faith. why does the BHA wish to impose its secular agenda on everyone, humanist or not?
Ibrahim Hewitt
Managing trustee, Al-Aqsa Schools Trust