Tanya Brewin was already reaching for her chequebook as she screeched to a halt outside the school. She was en route to the airport but had one last thing to do before taking off for a family holiday — write out a deposit for places for her three children at Sherfield school, outside Basingstoke, and clinch a significant reduction in fees as one of the first 100 families to sign up.

Switching three children — Caitlin, 11, Jonathan, 9, and six-year-old Ellie — from their private preparatory school in Berkshire meant savings of more than £11,500 a year on the children’s first two years and 5% on fees after that.

Brewin, who is divorced and works full-time for a property management centre, is grateful for the cheaper fees, particularly because her mother and father were paying the bills.

“I was very aware that the fees were coming out of my parents’ savings and net income. The numbers were already big enough but they were about to get even bigger as the children moved into senior schools,” she said.

Brewin and families like her are benefiting from an emerging feature of the independent sector, commercial companies running schools and intent on carving out a market with competitive fees and eye-catching discounts.

It is not yet known what effect these young pretenders will have on their more traditional cousins who may have been around for centuries but already there is speculation that the newcomers might put pressure on some heads to drive down fee increases.

Average private school fees are £7,668 a year, slightly higher for secondary schools and lower for preparatory schools. Top schools, however, can charge infinitely more — St Paul’s boys’ school in London charges £13,500 for day pupils, Westminster more than £15,000 and Winchester an eye-watering £21,000-plus.

This year parents could take some comfort from the lowest average fee increase in six years, 5.8%. The year before, however, the rise was 9.6%. And although schools are cautious about revealing projected increases — particularly after reports of alleged fee fixing in about 60 schools now being investigated by the Office of Fair Trading — it is expected that the average rise from September will be about 6%, triple the likely inflation rate.

In such an environment, families who want independent education can only welcome the advent of schools that hold out the prospect of competitive fees — provided, of course, the traditional educational perks of private schooling, such as small class sizes, are maintained.

Sherfield, Brewin’s choice, is one of 13 private schools belonging to the Dubai-based Gems, or Global Education Management Systems. Sunny Varkey, the businessman behind the company, has said that he wants 200 schools in three price bands, including a budget education costing £4,000- £6,000 a year.

In reality, the fees at Sherfield, which opened last September, are among the most expensive of the group at just under £10,000 a year. The fees at some other Gems schools come in at about £5,000 but the company thinks independent education can be delivered at an even lower price level.

“That is one thing we would like to do,” said Hugh McPherson, operating director of Gems. “But to do that, we need to build new schools on greenfield or brownfield sites rather than buying existing schools. That way there would be efficiencies in new buildings and the way they operated.”

Gems could take its cue from the education charity CfBT, which run two “no-frills” schools — St Andrew’s in Rochester, Kent, and Oakfield, south London, with fees of just over £3,000 a year and £4,500 respectively. But to deliver a private education at about £1,000 a term Neil McIntosh of CfBT has slashed all luxuries. “St Andrew’s is a genuine budget school and we are very careful not to spend money on anything not educationally essential,” he says.