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British Conservative Party leader David Cameron is presenting a “mid-term” review of Tory education policy on Tuesday, just after both Ofsted and Tony Blair have conceded that the Government has failed to achieve its primary objective: to provide a good start in life for every child, including those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. Less than two weeks ago, Ofsted found that just over half our secondary schools were failing to provide a good standard of education and Mr Blair announced last week that the number of city academies is to be doubled to 400, a tacit admission of nine years of failure.

Here was an open goal for the Tory opposition, but the response from Conservatives has been lame. The effective opposition has come from one of Labour’s half-banished outriders, Alan Milburn, who advocates a voucher scheme that would allow parents with a child at a failing state school to use government funds to buy their child a place in a private school. But why would vouchers help the poor? Aren’t they criticised by egalitarians for reinforcing existing patterns of disadvantage? And haven’t the Tories just ditched their own voucher scheme as proof of how compassionate they now are?

Once more, Mr Cameron has picked precisely the wrong moment to turn his back on market reform. The evidence that parental choice backed by vouchers benefits the disadvantaged is now so overwhelming that many on the political Left have become converts. In America, the Democrat mayor of Milwaukee has introduced vouchers for children whose parents fall below the US poverty line. Even Sweden, the social-democrat’s idea of heaven, has a voucher scheme.

Since 1992, parents in Sweden who are dissatisfied with the local state school have had a right to send their child to an independent school and to receive state funding, now equivalent to the average cost of a place in the state system. Independent schools are free to innovate but they can’t charge top-up fees or select pupils by ability. Starting from close to zero, by 2006 there were nearly 800 independent schools providing for about 7 per cent of children aged 7-16, and 10 per cent of those aged 16-plus. Many were created especially to cater for children with learning difficulties.

Controversial at first in Sweden, vouchers now enjoy cross-party support. They are even supported by the unions. The president of the Swedish Teachers Union has said that its members were “a little suspicious at first” but were now satisfied. Moreover, a survey of heads of education in Swedish municipalities found that standards had improved across the board in localities subject to the most competition from independent schools.

Sweden is not alone in encouraging competition from independent schools. Parents in Holland and Denmark have a legal right to state funding if they prefer private education. In the Netherlands, about 70 per cent of pupils attend privately-run schools that are state funded. In Denmark, support from only 40 parents is needed to secure state funding for a private school, and about 14 per cent of pupils attend independent schools financed by a voucher worth 85 per cent of the per-pupil cost in the state sector.

The most systematic evidence comes from America, where state schools are usually run by local school districts and attended by all pupils in the neighbourhood, which gives them an effective local monopoly. Since 1998, the city of Milwaukee in Wisconsin has allowed parents with an income at or below 175 per cent of the US poverty line to claim a voucher worth about $5,000, empowering them to pay for education in an independent school. Thousands have seized the chance.

To test the theory that competition raises standards in all affected schools, Caroline Hoxby of Harvard University studied attainment by Milwaukee’s pupils before and after the introduction of vouchers. She compared three types of school: those most subject to competition (with two-thirds or more of pupils eligible for vouchers); those subject to some competition (with less than two-thirds of their pupils eligible); and a group of other Wisconsin schools not subject to additional competition. Compared with the monopoly era before 1998, competition raised standards for everyone, and the bigger the risk of losing pupils to rival schools, the greater the improvement.

Public voucher schemes are only found in a few states, but many others have increased competition by encouraging charter schools. Typically a local school district gives a contract to a group of parents, a charity, or a business to run a school. Rules vary, but charter schools do not charge tuition fees, and are both non-religious and non-selective. The school district pays the school so much per pupil, typically much less than it pays state schools. In September 2006, there were more than 900 charter schools serving over one million pupils in 40 US states.

The first comprehensive study looked at 50,000 pupils aged 9-10 in 2002-03. Charter schools were contrasted with state schools that pupils would otherwise have attended. On average, children in charter schools were 5.2 per cent more proficient in reading and 3.2 per cent more in maths. The performance gap increased with the length of time a charter school had been operating: for reading ability it was an additional 2.5 per cent for schools that had been operating between one and four years; 5.2 per cent for schools 5-8 years old; and 10.1 per cent for those in operation for 9-11 years.

Charter schools were far more likely to have black, Hispanic and poor pupils. Professor Hoxby concluded that charter schools were disproportionately serving students who had “suffered from discrimination” in state schools. One of the striking features of US charter schools is that they receive less funding per pupil than nearby state schools, despite having a disproportionate number of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Their relative success evidently does not rest on expenditure per head, but rather on good teaching.

Egalitarians claim that school choice will only benefit the children of the rich, but experience from America and Sweden shows that competition has raised standards for everyone, rich and poor included. If Swedish social democrats and the new-Labour vanguard have spotted the evidence, why haven’t the Tories?

David Green is Director of Civitas.  This article previously appeared here.