All over the Swedish port city of Malmö last week there were gaggles of students clutching brand-new laptops given to them on loan for the start of the school year. As schools fight over what, due to a demographic blip, is a declining number of students, the device you get has become a keen area of competition.

"I've just got a mini-HP, but you can pay a bit more and get a Mac or an iPad," says Mua Stanbery, 16, who has just started at ProCivitas, the most popular of the town's profit-making free schools.

Students arriving at the Thoren Business School have to make do with a Dell. But Pauli Gymnasium, the biggest municipal-run school, this year decided to give MacBooks to all its students to stave off private competition.

What few of the students know is that the ultimate cause of their good fortune – the competitive system of free schools Sweden pioneered in the early 1990s – is under assault.

SNS, a prominent business-funded thinktank, issued a report last Wednesday that sharply reversed its normal pro-market stance. The entry of private operators into state-funded education, it argued, had increased segregation and may not have improved educational standards at all.

"The empirical evidence showing that competition is good is not really credible, because they can't distinguish between grade inflation and real gains," Dr Jonas Vlachos, who wrote the report on education, told the Observer.

The report had a huge impact. It was a top story on Swedish television, and was hotly debated the next day in the newspapers. How the debate plays out will be watched carefully by education experts in the UK, where 24 free schools, built on the Swedish model, opened this year.

TBH I find it disgraceful that children are fed any sort of collective worship [LIFTED] from the state education system.

I see no valid reason, at all, for state schools and state money being used to promote "worship".

+1
In a faith school, fine.
But in a normal state school it's just wrong, especially if the the child comes from an atheist family.

Religious eduaction yes, worship no.

I think it's okay for some form of religious education in schools. I had to sit through compulsory Religious Instruction (as my school called it), and it made me think and read more about it. I ended up an atheist because of religious learning in my education.

I'm not talking about religious education, I'm talking about religious worship in assemblies etc.

I do agree it really ought to be dropped these days. Religion is something families should provide for if it's important to them.

I ended up an atheist because of religious learning in my education.

My RE mock GCSE paper:
Q) Can you name eight of the ten commandments?
My A) No.
I got a bollocking for that one.

The response written in red on my work was “do your ideas fit the facts?”. I felt like writing “show me some facts then,” but I thought better of it. Perhaps I should have done so. I’d have probably been kept after school and made to copy a page of the bible out or something.

This was the problem when I was at school. RE wasn't religious education, it was basically christian indoctrination.

At no point were we taught about varied religions. We were, pretty much, force-fed the bible as a statement of fact.