Eton, Winchester and a host of other top public schools have, it seems, been naughty boys. As Saturday’s Times revealed, they have been caught exchanging e-mails behind the bike shed and talking to each other outside class about their fee increases. They are set for a pretty severe detention.

At first glance they seem guilty as charged — guilty, that is, of acting in what the Competition Act calls a “concerted practice” to fix their fees between them. But stop for a second and think what this actually means. They are charities; not some greedy corporation filching public money to buy yachts in Monaco for board members. Their co-operation was designed to see what level of fees the market could bear — fees which would be ploughed straight back into their pupils’ education.

The state sector education establishment must, nonetheless, be loving it. How it loathes those schools which — how dare they? — actually do what parents ask them to do: teach children properly and successfully.

So we can expect a series of attacks on private schools from the likes of Roy Hattersley and his fellow educational vandals, who betray their hatred and envy of others’ success with their every waking thought. How typical of the mindset which has ruined state education for decades. Instead of trying to emulate the success of the public schools, they simply want to destroy it.

There is, however, a way to replicate that success while acting against price fixing. We can open education to the market, making it impossible to rig, and give all parents the same ability to choose how and where their children are educated as those who can now afford to pay fees. If all parents were given a voucher, equivalent to the amount spent on each pupil in state schools, the educational landscape would be transformed. Children at the mercy of failing, sink schools would be given a way out and the chance of a decent education. Schools who treat parents as annoying encumbrances of their pupils would be forced to respect their wishes. Standards would rise across the board, as has been found in Sweden, which has introduced vouchers.

You read that right: Sweden. The most egalitarian people on Earth understand what British opponents of school choice do not: choice benefits, above all, the poor. Swedish councils are obliged to give a voucher representing 75 per cent of the average cost per student in municipal schools to any parent who wants one. The parents can spend that money in any school of their choice. Denmark and the Netherlands have similar arrangements.

Where would you rather have your child educated: at any number of sink schools in Britain, or in Stockholm, Copenhagen or Amsterdam, where standards are in a different league? Schools accepting vouchers will not be like Eton and Winchester, they will be much like any other decent school across the globe — getting on with teaching, the main job in hand. And they will give everyone the opportunity now available only to those with money.

As Milton Friedman put it recently: “What happens now is that those who are well-off have the choice to school their children wherever they’d like and they can afford to pay twice — once through taxes and once through tuition. Most of the population is not in that position. The vouchers would allow the lower classes to have nearly the same opportunity as the upper classes. So it would tend to reduce the difference between the rich and the poor. The only reason it has been argued the other way is ... well, I don’t know. I don’t see how it could be argued the other way ... What is the argument?”