Church schools will lose freedom to select pupils under plan from Labour's top education adviser

Richard Brooks, the new senior aide to Schools Secretary Ed Balls, accuses faith schools of causing "segregation by social class".

He claims that powers currently enjoyed by Church of England and Roman Catholic schools to choose children based on their faith are "unfair".

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Instead, Mr Brooks wants a new admissions system in which town hall bureaucrats would force popular Church schools to take a broad range of children based on their abilities and family income.

One of the schools that would be hit by the reforms would be The London Oratory, the elite Roman Catholic school attended by Tony Blair's oldest children. It recently fought a successful High Court battle to retain its powers to interview parents of prospective pupils to assess the family's level of religious devotion.

The move to restrict this ability would be a massive assault on the traditional autonomy enjoyed by Britain's 7,000 faith schools and would mark a major U-turn from Mr Blair's policy of trying to increase parental choice.

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Last night the Government refused to deny the plan was under active consideration, while Tory critics claimed the new policy would merely punish popular Church schools and overwhelm headteachers in red tape.

Mr Brooks is understood to have joined Mr Balls's Department for Children, Schools and Families last month as a senior policy aide, after being headhunted from a high-ranking position at the Institute for Public Policy Research, a thinktank with close ties to New Labour.

The report on school admissions was his last publication before he joined the Gordon Brown Government.

In it, he argues that the current system leads to "systematic unfairness" because faith schools "covertly" abuse their freedoms in order to admit the brightest and best behaved pupils.

If his proposals are accepted, no school would be allowed to manage its own admissions – a practice Mr Brooks compares to "pupils marking their own essays".

He calls for the introduction of what he terms "fair banding", in which each school would be forced to have "a mixed ability intake" of pupils.

He states: "Religious faith would no longer take strict precedence over all other factors in allocating places to these schools."

The Labour aide also attacks schools with specialist status, an initiative introduced during Mr Blair's Government. These are State schools which are allowed to select up to ten per cent of their students on aptitude for a given discipline, such as languages, art, music or sport.

His ideas also spell the end of the autonomy enjoyed by city academies, the new secondary schools backed by rich businessmen, which were another Blair-era creation.

The latest Labour plan follows an experimental scheme in Brighton and Hove where the council ran a lottery to allocate secondary-school places.

Conservative schools spokesman Michael Gove said: "Faith schools flourish because they provide a distinctive ethos and build strong relationships with committed parents.

"It appears that Ed Balls, not content with undermining the freedom of city academies, is now trying to ensure that Church schools bow the knee to Labour's town hall bureaucrats." A Government spokesman said: "Richard Brooks is one of hundreds of civil servants providing policy advice. Ministers make decisions on policies."