Church schools move towards open door selection

We’ve been praying a lot recently,” admits one 40-something father with a smile.

His young daughter has just been accepted by a very popular Church of England school, which is heavily oversubscribed.

“We call it ‘on your knees to save the fees'”, he says.

“We would probably attend the local church anyway, but perhaps just not quite as much as we have done over the past year or so.”

Others have nicknamed the phenomenon “pew barging”, or “pray, not pay”, as worried middle-class parents seek to secure a good education for their children without paying for an often unaffordable place at private school.

He is among several parents who asked not to be named, but admitted that their church attendance became rather more frequent when the time came to ensure a good state school place for their children.

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The education charity, the Sutton Trust, released a survey in 2013 which found that overall, 6% of parents would develop a sudden interest in church-going when it was time to place their children in school – a figure that went up to 10% among the middle-classes.

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