‘Always read the small print’ is a good guide to politics as well as finance. Observers of the coverage of the Schools Adjudicator’s speech last week would have read newspaper headlines such as "Faith schools worst for flouting entry rules"; "Half of state schools are breaking admissions rules, inquiry finds" and "Half of schools flout rules on selecting pupils". Yet if you read the detail of the Adjudicator’s comments the evidence showed that it was “administrative confusion” and “technical issues” that were the cause of the non-compliance with the admissions code and "nothing led me [the Adjudicator] to believe that people were trying to select by stealth."

Unfortunately the speech amounted to a pre-announcement of the findings; it did not actually coincide with the publication of the report, so it is impossible to scrutinize the evidence until a later date. In the meantime the damaging perception that faith schools are routinely behaving in an underhand or even illegal way has again taken root in the media.

This of course all goes back to Ed Balls’ release earlier this year of so-called “shocking evidence” of selection among some religious schools. As Cristina Odone argued in her CPS pamphlet In Bad Faith, this attack marked a striking departure from the Blair/Adonis years of support for faith schools and owed more to political positioning than to proper evidence. In fact it came on the same day as the Government had to admit that one in five children had failed to gain admission to the secondary school of their choice. In this important policy area, as in too many others, it seems that the Government’s enthusiasm for rhetoric and spin is their way of distracting attention from their failure to deliver – in the case of education, the failure to improve standards in so many of our schools over the last decade.