Yes, I cheated for my child's education

And I confess I have done all of the above in my time, as, I reckon, have many other Londoners. We are accused of chicanery and described as selfish, immoral and unfair. Yet the parental instinct to protect and advance offspring is a biological imperative. I would kill the last tiger on earth if it was attacking my baby and steal food to keep my infant alive. Wouldn't you?

In the 1980s my son was welcomed into a Church of England primary school. It was small and the children were polite, happy and motivated. I also wanted my boy to learn about Christianity, as it makes the country what it is. Sixteen years later when I tried to get my daughter into the school, it had turned into a protectionist enclave, a citadel. Its admission policies were forbidding barricades keeping out all but narrowly proscribed Anglicans who had passed various "commitment" tests. My borough is one of the most racially and culturally mixed in London. The school had decided it had no obligation to any other citizens but its own.

Appeals were no good. You had to be CofE, have church attendance certificates, prove you had donated to collections, ensure the child went to Sunday school. I decided to baptise my daughter. They knew and I knew it was a ploy. I told the local priest they were pushing me into dishonourable tactics.

My daughter got in but was made so miserable we took her out. The purists won by behaving unfairly.

We should condemn not the parents but the failures of our education system and the ruthless exclusionary practices of church schools. Standards of state education are relatively consistent in most EU countries. Here, though there have been significant improvements in the past decade, provision is patchy. We still have too many schools with low achievement and behavioural problems - and so word gets around about Church schools. If all state-funded schools were obliged to have flexible and fair admissions policies, parents would not have to resort to pushy and dodgy tactics.

Sort out the iniquitous system, I say, and stop blaming desperate parents who only want to secure the future of their children.