But second, these years were a period of extraordinary growth in private schooling. More and more parents, it seemed, were eager to pay for their children's education. With increasing demand chasing a comparatively inelastic supply, the inevitable happened. Fees went up, sometimes at an eye-watering pace. I don't normally think of myself as a man of unshakeable rectitude, but when I recall some of the disinterested votes I cast in favour of fee rises when I was still a parent, I'm encouraged to view my moral character in a much more favourable light. Costs, at least to begin with, went up more slowly than the fees. What to do with the resulting surpluses? By far the easiest solution was to put up a new building or upgrade an old one. Schools quickly found themselves caught up in an accelerating arms race of facilities. Headmasters' wish-lists were converted into realities with extraordinary speed.

If the parents by and large acquiesced in these developments funded by their fees, nor was there much debate on the governing body about the likely educational benefits to be produced by these expensive new facilities. It seemed self-evident that, say, upgraded art facilities would lead to a higher quality of artwork. No audit was ever carried out to see if this in fact turned out to be the case, although it would have been easy to assemble statistics of marks achieved in a particular subject at Common Entrance before and after a particular improvement, which would have provided at least a starting point for reasoned discussion.

But this was not of interest to governors, because the point of these facilities was not so much to improve the quality of the school's output as to guarantee the volume of its input. These facilities were intended to catch the eye of prospective parents and to induce them to put their children down for this school rather than for its rivals. And in this governors did not miscalculate. Parents often seemed to choose between competing schools on the most superficial grounds. I suspect that, if school A had a 25-metre swimming pool, and school B only a 20-metre pool, then that might have swung it for the former with not a few parents. But I am not aware of any prospective parent in my time as a governor asking to observe a lesson, though there were plenty who came armed with a sheaf of questions about the bathrooms in the boarding houses.

Nothing grows to the sky. Three events brought this inflationary spiral in private education to a halt. In the first place, the Office of Fair Trading inquiry into the setting of school fees, which concluded that at least some schools were operating as a cartel, hit school governing bodies like a bucket of water thrown over two dogs. No matter that the logical response to the ruling would have been to put fees up the next year again by what had by then become the usual 7 or 8 or 9 per cent. Governing bodies everywhere flinched from the severe rationality of this counsel. Instead, they drew in their horns, and timidly suggested rises of 1 or 2 or 3 per cent — and by so doing of course confirmed that they had been, indeed, operating as a cartel. With such sub-inflationary increases, surpluses very quickly came under pressure.