At a stroke, this permits good schools, and good head teachers, to extend their influence over poorer ones. It makes a reality of what every government has hoped to achieve in education: spreading “best practice” throughout the system, pulling the standards of under-performing schools up to the level of better ones by allowing the best to become active mentors to the others.  In logistical (and political) terms, it will avoid what might have been a damaging effect of the free schools policy. Instead of poor schools having to be seen to fail, in a long, painful process of losing student numbers through parental choice and thus losing funding – with their gradual decline becoming a source of national shame and local outcry – those schools that might have died a lingering death may now save themselves by being adopted by a successful one.  No one can pretend that this solution will be unproblematic. Will the outstanding school actually take over the less good one? Will this oblige it to absorb disruptive pupils or incompetent staff? Or alternatively, might the association be so nominal that it will have little effect on the standards of the poorer school?  But coupled with Mr Gove’s other neglected pronouncement – that education funding is to be handed direct to schools, thus avoiding the overweening political influence of local education authorities – this measure just might help to achieve a stunning improvement in the quality of state education. Of course, such school affiliations will require the sincere desire to improve on the one hand, and a genuine commitment to offer guidance on the other, but these will be the responsibility of heads and teachers: the Gove mechanisms are offering as great an opportunity for national educational improvement as any politician could humanly manage.  Remarkably consistent with this move toward self-reliance and mutual assistance among schools was the second of last week’s policy launches: what has become known, inevitably, as the “John Lewis” model for restructuring public services. Offering an invitation – and even a small pot of start-up money – to public sector staff willing to take over and run the hospital, job centre or whatever in which they are employed, is a move of stunning political bravery.  Not that the concept is all that original in itself. (It has an ancestor, after all, in the co-operative movement.) Labour actually put a tentative, under-publicised toe in the water of mutualism as a formula for more productive and efficient public services, but it lacked the conviction to present the idea with anything like the gusto and evangelical commitment with which Francis Maude is now selling the Tory version.  The basic theory is simple and incontrovertible: staff who are what John Lewis calls “partners” in the enterprise – who share ownership of it and benefit directly when it is doing well – have a stake in its efficiency, productiveness and popularity with clients of a kind that no time-serving employee is likely to possess. This would also have the effect of “localising” the service and making it more responsive: staff who knew and understood the needs of their own community would be free to adapt their approach to suit those specific requirements, rather than simply carrying out impersonal diktats passed down from central government. (This is a consistent government objective: the Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, wants to devolve planning power from politicians down to real people in real neighbourhoods.)  Again, there are some obvious risks which the Government, in spite of its eagerness to be un-prescriptive – to go for bottom-up suggestions rather than top-down formulae – will have to guard against. When an earlier Conservative government ordered councils to disband their direct labour forces and take competitive bids for contracted work instead, too many of them simply permitted their labour gangs to form “companies” whose tenders for council contracts were, mysteriously, always successful. So the same old people ended up doing the same old jobs with as little enthusiasm as ever.  If employees are to bid to become owners and managers of a service-providing business, then they must, like the staff of John Lewis, be exposed to real competition in something like a real marketplace. Otherwise, this whole venture will end up as nothing but a species of producer capture. But mention the words “market” and “competition” and you bring a sneer to the lips of Labour/trade union axe-grinders. How can anything as crass as the principles of retailing be applied to areas such as health and social services? Getting access to chemotherapy isn’t like buying cereal, they breathe piously.  Except that, in the terms which we are discussing, it might be better if it was: why shouldn’t medical treatment and social care involve more informed choice and more respect for individual preferences? This is not about “privatisation”. It is about creating an analogous kind of power to the one people are accustomed to exercising as consumers.  There is a theme here. From its welfare and education reforms to a revolution in the running of public services, the Government has a Big Idea which involves personal freedom within the bounds of community responsibility. This is worthy of all the attention we can give it.
The Coalition&rsquo;s proposals should have a tumultuous and welcome effect on    public services, says Janet Daley.