Muslim families look to have lost their long battle for a state-funded Islamic school in Oxford.

A year-long investigation into how Oxfordshire faith schools operate was ordered following Muslim demands for their own secondary school in Headington.

A draft of the long-awaited Faith In Our Schools Report recommended Oxfordshire County Council should reject the plan.

Church schools in future should reserve a percentage of places for pupils from different faiths, said the report.

It went on to recommend that schools should be able to make some single-sex provision in some classes and to teach languages such as Arabic, Urdu or Hebrew.

The draft report will be considered by the county council's learning and culture scrutiny committee on May 11.

It will bitterly disappoint Muslims. After failing to stop the scrapping of single-sex education in the Oxford schools' reorganisation, they tried to buy the site of Windmill First School, in Margaret Road, to found a school for up to 200 pupils.

But the report concluded it was not "currently appropriate", saying diversity was a better way to promote social cohesion.

Monawar Hussain, a campaigner for single-sex education, said: "I cannot fathom why you can have Catholic and Jewish schools, but having a Muslim school is such a big problem."

The Catholic Church said it would resist attempts to make it accept a percentage of non-Catholics in its schools.

Father Marcus Stock, director of schools for the Archdiocese of Birmingham, said: "We have a statutory duty, under which we have the responsibility of ensuring there are sufficient places for Catholic children. We are simply not in a position to be able to reserve places for children of other faiths."