Can conservative policies deliver progressive goals? Michael Gove, the Shadow Education Secretary, claims they can, and he may be right: in setting out his plans for schools he has proposed change of a comprehensive kind.

The defining idea is to allow new providers of education to flood the system. Since a prototype reform was introduced in Sweden in 1992, 900 new schools have been established. The Tories plan a similarly radical overhaul with legislation that would allow any child who attends a failing school the right to transfer to a better one. There would be a funding premium for poorer pupils. And the State would move from being the principal provider of schooling to its guarantor.

This is a bold and welcome package, but in two significant respects is not as innovative as its Swedish model. First, supply will be artificially restricted by the refusal to allow schools to turn a profit. A regulated return on capital for new schools would both entice new suppliers and ensure that the up-front capital costs would be borne by the provider rather than the taxpayer.

Secondly, it remains to be seen how Mr Gove will deal with the problem of schools that are oversubscribed. In time, extra school places would alleviate the problem. But it will still make sense for parents to choose the very best. If places are then allocated according to proximity to the school, there will be a high price premium in the catchment area. Abolish this and replace it with a lottery - the only way that is fair to all applicants - and the local middle-class will cry foul. Mr Gove will find that progressive goals tend to annoy conservative voters.

But, these points apart, he is starting to dominate the education debate while Ed Balls, the Children's Secretary, has placed too much faith in a blizzard of policy initiatives.

Mr Balls cannot be faulted for lack of energy. But his exhaustive Children's Plan was a fiesta of central mandates, already mostly forgotten. It included some good things - more time in the primary curriculum for reading, studio schools to teach trades; and some silly things - a national play strategy, a £225 million playground painting programme and government recipes for rhubarb crumble. But its basic problem was the folly of supposing that these things can be simply mandated into existence.

The Children's Secretary's conversion to the academy programme has been welcome. So is his pledge to build 400 of them, and to outbuild the Conservatives in the process. But his insistence on greater local authority control suggests he still does not understand that independence is the essential feature that makes Academies successful. Mr Gove, meanwhile, has purloined the very same strapline - independent state schools - that Tony Blair wanted for the 2005 Schools White Paper.

Mr Gove's summary of his position should make Labour pause. “Education,” he has said “should be a path to a more equal society ... but the means to be deployed are conservative - choice, competition and trust in the innate good sense of the people at the local level.”

Mr Blair could scarcely have put it better himself. The Tories' plans for school reform owe a good deal to Sweden. But they are also designed to pick up where Blairism left off, and are none the worse for that.