I caught a train home from London the other week. It was delayed. In rush hour. Wedged into the crowd clutching two bags and a tired five-year-old, I braced myself for the platform announcement and the mad dash to board a train that would seat roughly half of its passengers.

Competition brings out the best in some people. It fires their sinews and propels them forward to greatness. I am not one of these people. Competition awakens my flight, not fight, mode. It makes me want to drop out and sleep. In Darwinian terms, I’m a waste of space.  

Which is not to say I dislike a bit of healthy competition. I would hate to teach without maths knockouts and spelling slam downs; I think a sports day without winners is completely pointless; and my autumn term would be infinitely poorer without Bake Off.  

But what about the less healthy forms of competition? If overcrowded trains fail to bring out the best in humanity, what happens when the overcrowding is in education?

In the holidays, I got chatting to a guest at a party who was bemoaning the fact that, for the first time in years, her child’s school wasn’t oversubscribed and so had accepted a couple of children from out of catchment.

“It’s not right,” she told me. “We’ve paid a premium for our houses so our children can go to this school. They shouldn’t be getting in, too.”

What about equality in education?

Setting aside the fact that some people are obnoxious beyond belief, it was a genuine revelation to discover that, for some middle-class parents, it’s not enough to get their children into the “best” schools - they also need to pull the drawbridge up after them.

And it’s not just the parents. I once heard a headteacher tell a crowded hall of parents how lucky they were to have their children in the school and - to emphasise the point -  they namechecked all the local schools as being hugely inferior.

All of which made me wonder whether some aspects of present-day education: school places, public ranking of children, selective schools are not so much of a race as a fait accompli.

And when times are tight, the competition naturally intensifies. Backing paper, glue sticks, funding for music lessons and teaching assistants: all are running out and difficult decisions have to be made.

In these straitened times, it would be comforting to know that there’s a higher authority at work: some kind of benign force fighting desperately for equality of provision so that it’s not just a seemingly random act of cruelty that some children who desperately relied on support staff will return to school this year to find them gone.

Money alone is no guarantee of a great school experience but a severe shortage of it will almost definitely make that experience less rich in some respect.

And when there are more passengers than seats, those at the top could do worse than to brush up on their utilitarianism. The education of every child is way too important to fall into the realm of survival of the fittest.    

Jo Brighouse is a pseudonym for a teacher in the Midlands. She tweets @jo_brighouse