A new report, 'An Unholy Mess: how virtually all religiously selective state schools in England are breaking the law' reveals that thousands of children have been denied access to religiously selective schools.
It also claims that schools are failing to comply with the School Admissions Code.
The document was produced by the British Humanist Association (BHA) on behalf of the Fair Admissions Campaign (FAC).
Andrew Copson, the Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association, told Premier that: "If our sample is representative, and there's no reason to believe that it isn't, we could be talking about hundreds of thousands of violations across the country, across England, which could have affected hundreds of thousands of children."
He said: "Over a million state school places in England are subject to religious selection and it's well known that religious schools have been abusing the admissions system for some time.
"Even so, no one can have imagined the problem was as widespread as this report shows.
"Of course, it's a scandal to begin with that these schools are able by law to discriminate against children on the grounds of their parents' religious beliefs, but the fact that they're seeking to find further ways to turn children away is disgraceful.
Religious selection by state schools is the archaic practice that allows these abuses and must be brought to an end."
Paul Barber, Director of the Catholic Education Service said in light of the report: "School admissions are extremely complex and are accompanied by hundreds of pages of legal framework, so the most likely causes of breaches in the code are unintended admin errors.
"The BHA 'research' only takes into account a small cross-section of schools and fails to represent the national picture outlined by the Office of School Adjudicator in its most recent report.
"We expect all Catholic schools to comply with the code and local dioceses provide support for schools to do so. It is because of our admissions system that Catholic schools are the most ethnically diverse in England and contain higher than the national average of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds."
Revd Nigel Genders, the Church of England's chief education officer released a statement:
"We would strongly refute any suggestion that our schools have a near universal noncompliance with the Code. The Office of schools adjudicator annual report tells a very different story to this over exaggerated report which equates small administrative errors or minuscule technicalities with major systemic failure. If schools were able to focus more time on getting on running their schools, rather than responding to these sorts of campaigns, children would be better served.
"The majority of Church of England schools do not prioritise their places on the basis of church attendance, and most of those that do still make places available for children in the school's immediate community. Our secondary schools have an average of 10% selection by religious criteria – this is based on church attendance only. We also have as many pupils on free school meals as the national average, some much higher."
Listen to Premier's Hannah Tooley speak to Andrew Copson here:
Listen to Premier's Marcus Jones speak to Paul Barber, the Directer of the Catholic Education Service, on Premier's News Hour here:
