Please let there be a real move towards totally secular schooling in my lifetime. This whole thread is an illustraton of why religion has no part in schooling. Madness that people don't have a choice but to send their children to religious schools.
If you want a religious education, you should pay for one, to my mind. State education at primary is religious enough. Would that the link were severed! A state comprehensive system should be just that, comprehensive, with NO religious criteria. It's one ( of the many) reasons I don't like Free schools too.
I saw, whilst teaching, parents "get" religion to get into schools. I saw them try anything rather than let Jocasta go to the primary down the road. I saw schools become "Muslim" or "Jewish" through intake, and now it's ok through Free Schools. And yet the best school I ever taught in was 80% children with a foreign language, had a massive mix of over 15 different relligions, and over 70 different nationalities. It was truly comprehensive. The worst was religious, and allmost entirely white middle class and selective. But how do you judge results? Which school was better, the selective, which threw God down your throat and got A*, but woe betide if you didn't make the grade, or the comp, which didn't do God, and got kids who had arrived from war-torn countries only two years ago and lived in care a C at GCSE? And thus, any child who tried there did well? I know the answer.