I'm Catholic, my husband is Church of England. Our son isn't either because we couldn't agree or compromise on which religion he should be as I wanted him to be Catholic and my husband wanted him to be Church of England. So to make it fair we did neither.
We have 3 local schools, 1 Catholic, 1 Church of England and 1 non denomination. We agreed to go to the open days for all 3 with an open mind and treat all 3 equally. And both agreed that whichever school we both felt was the best for our son was the school we would put as our first choice.
It turned out it was the Catholic school that was the best by far. My husband was I’m complete agreement on that. We spoke to the headteacher at the open day and explained our situation. My husband clarified that he had no problems at all with our son joining in with prayers or the viewpoint they partial lying teach from, and obviously I didn’t as I went to a Catholic school myself, I wanted him to be baptised a Catholic (always will), and I wanted him to go to that school so had no issues with that at all. We also put that information on the school supplementary faith form so they knew it wasn’t a problem at all.
The headteacher told us that in recent years the school hadn’t been oversubscribed and that she felt our son was highly likely to get a place, which pleased us both. However I knew that if the school was oversubscribed this academic year (2020-2021), that the oversubscription criteria would be used to determine offers of places. I also knew that based on that criteria my son fell into the last category as he is not of any faith or religion. I had to accept that he would not get a place if the school was oversubscribed. But what I would never want to do is take a place from a child of the faith because that would be completely wrong and unfair of me. Therefore I would not have got my son baptised just for the purpose at all. (If my husband was to agree and I believed he meant it then yes I would because I’ve wanted my child to be a Catholic since I found out I was pregnant, so I’m not a hypocrite). As mentioned by previous posters that is unacceptable. I knew that my son would only get a place if there were less Catholic children that applied than there were places available. Therefore he or we would not be taking a place from a child more deserving of it based on the religious aspect or from that point of view.
So I don’t feel we have done anything wrong in terms of our approach whatsoever. However what you are suggesting is not right at all. Especially given how strongly you feel with regards to the Catholic Church. Why would you want your child to have anything to do with something you hate so much? Prestigious school or not should be irrelevant. Baptising your child should be about your belief and faith and wanting your child to be brought up within that, not to get them into a school. Also you can’t just turn up one day, do it and then that’s it. It doesn’t work like that at all. So to answer your question yes I think what you are suggesting is extremely unreasonable, even more so given your quite extreme viewpoint.