If legislation ever issues from this report from the Performance and Innovation Unit, it will pin charitable status to delivering “community benefit”. But that is going to be defined weakly. To retain their special position, the schools will have to demonstrate mere good will. Opening the school playing fields on Saturday mornings for local kids and running summer schools for the under-privileged should just about do it.

So the Headmasters’ and Mistresses’ Conference can sleep easy. It is hard to see Labour or anyone else having another bite at this much chewed-over cherry. But is some minimal obeisance to a vague Blairite sense of social obligation all the public schools want to get away with? Yes, if they have no value set beyond an increasingly thin individualism. Yes, if they are just exam machines, pushing middle-class sons and daughters through the 16+ and 18+ hoops at considerable expense. (Not very efficiently, actually. Like Oxbridge colleges, public schools do not always add value to their well-groomed material. If West-minster didn’t get all those A-level passes, something would be going badly awry.) Let me come clean. My son recently left one such school, leaving me with a sense of moral deficit. This is not one of those whinges by cash-strapped parents, wondering just what all the money bought. It’s a citizen’s anxiety. These schools educate a substantial slice of the corporate class, leaders in firms and other organisations; their ethical preparation for work and in civil society matters to us all.

Let’s call the school in question Blandchester. Let’s start with the address to leavers by the school’s begowned head, delivered in a hallowed place lit through stained glass. I was so amazed by the banality of what he had to say that I have done some checking to confirm how typical he might be - and I fear he is.

I paraphrase. As you go out into the world to make a bundle, he said, take with you the wisdom of a great sage whom I encountered (oh yes, you still get the old accusative in these schools) when I was young. His name was John Lennon.

This high priest of selective education then proceeded to recite, in the midst of an ancient church, the words of “Imagine”, including (without missing a beat) “Iand no religion, too”. Blandchester is not, in other words, a self-aware place. Nor, these days, does it have much soul. Yet, what the head had to say - or, rather, did not say - chimed with my (vicarious) experience of the school.

Its students study hard; they get a lot of intellectual stimulation. But not much else. The school magazine, typical it appears, is inward looking and petty. There is no school ethic. No sense of where its students (or teachers) fit in a changing British society. No sense of obligation or the responsibilities of privilege: the school’s mission seems to be to fit them for the most mindless kinds of merchant banking. There’s nothing wrong with finance capital but a twinge of conscience or even consciousness (about sustainable development, say) might help.

Blandchester was recently inspected. The picture that the report painted was of a morally empty space. Of course, the school does music and drama. Of course, it and the others do good works. But too much of what they do has a solipsistic, even narcissistic flavour: it is rarely about society out there. “Society” in private schools has come to mean drugs and little else. Events arranged for physically handicapped young people are not joined up; contacts with neighbouring schools are perfunctory. The schools’ participation in education at large is minimal.

The public schools educate, still, too high a proportion of the nation’s top people for their moral strength not to matter. I wonder if there is much.

David Walker writes for the Guardian and, with Polly Toynbee, is the author of Did Things Get Better? (Penguin, 2001)