I met a paediatrician who could not keep her family on the money she earned. So on Saturdays she cleaned the flat of an American businessman who paid her in dollars, and earned more than she could earn in the whole of the rest of the week.

They say it has all changed now. I have just returned from Moscow, where deputy mayor Joseph Ordzhonike, told me that schools have improved beyond recognition. Forty-five per cent of the city’s total budget is now spent on social policy, including health and education. For the first time since 1918, Russia was spending more on social policy than on defence. “Each year we build 15 new schools in Moscow, and Moscow teachers are much better paid now,” he said.

But there is a downside. And it is one that British education policy-makers ought to study closely, because our present direction, with its heavy reliance on private-sector involvement and its undermining of teachers’ pay scales, leads straight to the place Moscow is in now.

Most of Moscow’s 15 new state schools a year rely for their capital on private-sector investment. I heard of one, whose sponsoring consortium is headed by former Russian Prime Minister Evgeni Primakov, which has a new, spacious building, a good teacher:pupil ratio and well-paid staff. Places are free, but in order to get one, parents must pay for three school exchange tours a year for their children to cities such as London and Paris, at $1,500 each. The average Muscovite has as much chance of finding $4,500 a year - somewhat more than pound;3,000 - as of flying to the moon.

So most of Moscow’s children attend the old, crumbling Soviet schools, where underpaid Soviet-trained teachers cannot equip them to thrive in Russia’s new market economy. “They are run in the Soviet style, with an emphasis on discipline and rote-learning,” a Moscow teacher told me. “Their directors do not know how to go out and get sponsorship. So they decay.”

Compare this with the vision the British Government has for our schools. In two years’ time, we will still have comprehensive schools, struggling on diminishing state funding, alongside new specialist schools and city academies, in which the private sector is being offered generous inducements to invest.

Our specialist schools will select 10 per cent of their pupils on “aptitude”. City academies are modelled on the Conservatives’ city technology colleges, and are likely to try to replicate the same selection scams, which included interviewing prospective pupils and their parents. In other words, our privately-sponsored schools will find backdoor ways of selecting their pupils. We know from our experience of grammar schools that when you select, you reject the poor.

Having opened up two classes of school - privately-sponsored schools for the elite, and ordinary comprehensives for the hoi polloi - the next stage is to create two classes of teacher: well-paid teachers for the elite, badly-paid ones for the rest.

The Russians are not hampered by nationally-agreed pay rates. In Moscow’s privately - sponsored schools, teachers are paid well. But in ordinary state schools, they are very badly paid. This is the position which British ministers have been trying to reach. Performance-related pay and flexibility are staging posts on the troubled road to a nirvana where the obstacle of nationally-agreed pay rates disappears. Schools can over or underpay teachers according to the dictates of the market.

Britain has seen nothing quite like the trauma of the collapse of communism in 1991. But we have made our own version of that transition. Britain has seen the eclipse, for the time being, of the idealism that underlies communism, and the triumph of the idea that business is always right. Russia is discovering that slavery to capitalist ideologies is not always preferable to slavery to communist ones. We, who managed to avoid the second slavery, ought to be trying to avoid the first, too.

Francis Beckett is a freelance journalist and commentator