Faith schools, social capital and academic attainment: evidence from TIMSS-R mathematics scores in Flemish secondary schools Geoff Pugh *a and Shqiponje Telhaj b a Staffordshire University, UK; b London School of Economics, UK (Submitted 27 June 2005; resubmitted 25 November 2005; accepted 10 March 2006) Social capital theory, recent developments in the theory of identity and a small econometric literature all suggest positive attainment effects from faith schooling. To test this hypothesis, the authors use a unique data set on Flemish secondary school students from the 1999 repeat of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study to estimate an education production function. The results suggest modest attainment benefits in mathematics when schools are influenced by faith communities but not when they are influenced by trade unions or business groups. The authors estimate models with exogenous and endogenous switching to investigate the robustness of this result to school selection policy and parental/student self-selection. These additional results not only suggest that the positive attainment effects of faith schooling do not reflect selection bias but also provide evidence suggesting that such attainment effects reflect forms of social capital that are more readily available in faith schools than in non-faith schools. However, the limitations of social capital theory and evidence caution against radical policy conclusions. 1. Introduction This article uses a unique data set on Flemish secondary school students to analyse influences on attainment in mathematics. From this platform, we investigate the particular contribution of church/religious (faith) influence on schools. This topic is motivated by recent policy debate on faith schools in the UK (Morris, 2005) and theoretically grounded in a large and diffuse literature on ‘social capital’, a smaller but focused quantitative literature on the ‘Catholic school effect’, and recent *Corresponding author. Institute for Education Policy Research, Faculty of Business and Law, Staffordshire University, Leek Road, Stoke-on-Trent, ST4 2DF, UK. Email: geoff@ plainfigures.com British Educational Research Journal Vol. 34, No. 2, April 2008, pp. 235–267 ISSN 0141-1926 (print)/ISSN 1469-3518 (online)/08/020235-33 # 2008 British Educational Research Association DOI: 10.1080/01411920701532178