My reader said last week’s blog was a bit dull and wonky so this week I will speak from the heart.

It’s only really today that I can bear to talk about it, but on Monday me and my two sons watched our beloved West Bromwich Albion lose to Derby in the Championship play-off final.

For those of you who don’t know, this is a triple whammy: it means the whole the season has come to nothing, the club loses out on £50 million plus of TV and sponsorship revenue, and the team will almost certainly lose three or four of its best players to Premiership sides.

I wish I could say that it was still a great day out, after all Wembley is fantastic and we enjoyed the excellent hospitality of T-Mobile (a far sighted company which sponsors both West Brom and the RSA Coffeehouse Challenge). But I’m afraid whoever it was that said it is the taking part that matters never had a team in the play-offs!

And yet in seeking comfort out of adversity there are insights to be had. My boys were completely distraught and so I had to be the grown up. As I said to them, “After you’ve lost this match the team can never hurt you as much again.”

I have started going to Albion games with my friend Adrian Chiles. He is so emotionally tied up with West Brom, and has been all his life, that on bad days I always know there is someone suffering more than me. But there was something else – the reason I think all this is a suitable subject for my blog.

One of the Albion’s favourite players over the years is a central defender called Darren Moore. His universal nick name is ‘Big Dave’ which is apparently a reference to an advertisement for chips from the 1980s.

Anyone who has seen his play can quickly see his strengths (power, size, experience, ability to score headed goals) but also his limitations (he is not exactly nippy and has the turning circle of a family estate car). But the reason fans love him is that he plays every game as if it was his last, is a committed team player and although he is tough and not afraid to give away free kicks there is not an ounce of malice in his huge frame.

Anyway, last season ‘Dave’ left us and went to Derby, and so on Monday he was on the wining team. At the final whistle Derby players were as elated as ours were deflated. They ran around like madmen, jumping on each other, punching the air and grabbing scarves and banners from the crowd.

All, that is, except one man. As the Albion players sank to the ground, many of them in tears, Big Dave was there to comfort each one of them in turn. He must have hugged our distraught left back Paul Robinson for a full 30 seconds (if that doesn’t sound long try doing it with a consenting colleague). All this when he could have been lapping up the adoration of 33,000 of his own fans.

Watching this reminded me and my boys of a simple truth; like all sport (and life itself) football picks us up and knocks us down, we can’t win every time, but it is in our power to be gracious in victory and philosophical in defeat.

More than that, in Big Dave’s deliberate walk to the West Brom end I saw on Monday the incredible power of small acts of kindness.

So here is a challenge to our Fellows – why doesn’t someone out there start a web site to celebrate small kindnesses (smallkindeness.com?). As a counter to the dystopian vision projected by the mainstream media, this could be place for us to record and celebrate the small things that strangers do to make our world better.

A place to thank or even get to know the person who helped us pick up our dropped shopping, or drew us a little map to get us to our tricky destination. And beyond the happy anecdotes (a good thing in itself) maybe we could find out more about why we do the right thing and how we might be encouraged to do it more.

So from West Brom back to my obsession with pro-social behaviour. I may be talking nonsense but if it helps me stop thinking about playing at Blackpool when we could have been going to Arsenal it’s good enough for me.

One of my priorities at the RSA has been to build on the reputation and current strength of our work on education.

Our Opening Minds curriculum is taught in over a hundred schools and has influenced planned reforms across Key Stage 3 (11-14). We now want to work with a range of partners to develop insight and ideas across other key aspects of schooling.

As we seek to widen the scope and reach of our work, our Academy in Tipton will be the practical embodiment of our ambition to develop a new model of schooling to develop the citizens of the future.

The opening of the Academy will coincide with the launch of the first five of the Government’s new 14-19 Diplomas. By 2013 there are supposed to be 14 of these Diplomas in areas ranging from Hair and Beauty to Engineering. The Diplomas are being introduced alongside GCSEs and A levels and represent a watered down version of Sir Mike Tomlinson’s recommendation that all post 14 provisions should be delivered through a single diploma framework.

Although many in the education world find it hard not to see the Diplomas that are being introduced as a missed opportunity to overcome the academic vocational divide, everyone recognises that even delivering the current proposals is a huge challenge.

So it is worrying to read two recent progress reports. The first is a detailed assessment by the Commons Education and Skills Committee. While the Committee recognises that the process of introduction is still officially on track, they raise a number of concerns ranging from the general – the clarity of purpose among those involved in designing the fist five Diplomas – to the specific – the inadequacy of giving teachers just three days training in how to teach and manage the courses, or the logistical challenges of 14-16 year old students receiving their learning in more than one institution.

The second report was from the Edge Foundation and confirmed the worst fears of those who held to Tomlinson’s original vision. Edge’s survey of teachers and FE lecturers found that almost two-thirds of them believe the Diplomas will have a lower status than GCSEs and A levels. The Government’s stated aim that the Diplomas will be seen as relevant to students across the ability range lacks credibility among those who most need to believe it.

It is hardly surprising that there are teething problems with the Diplomas – the timetable set by the Government is very ambitious. Major change processes rarely look entirely convincing at their halfway point.

The real cause for concern is that the Diplomas are trying to do an incredibly hard job in bridging the academic vocational divide. This is a task that has been tried and failed repeatedly, but it is vital if our education system is to provide opportunities and fulfilment to learners and the right skills for the economy.

But success more than anything else relies on the whole secondary and FE system throwing its weight behind reform. The combination of the major practical barriers to delivery and the continuing evidence that many teachers and schools (particularly those catering for more privileged pupils) have failed to engage with Diplomas, suggest that the odds of success are diminishing.

Given his commitment to education and skills and to widening opportunity to all it is difficult to see any more urgent issues in Gordon Brown’s Prime Ministerial in-tray.

Thanks to those who responded positively to last week’s post. With yet another crazy RSA week behind me I can only add a few lines.

Among lectures chaired, speeches made and interviews given, this week I hosted a supper for a range of people involved in the idea of empowerment and participation.

Charlie Leadbeater started us off with aspects of the thesis in his new book – ‘We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity‘. You can view it as a wiki and add comments or edit it online.

The discussion was wide ranging but recurrent themes included the scope for empowerment as a public sector strategy, the implication of this for equity and accountability and whether empowerment is fundamentally an individualistic or collectivist solution (of course, it can be both).

There were good examples such as individual budgets for social care clients and carers, or provision for disaffected school pupils. But underlying the discussion was the question: is the idea of the empowering state the next big thing or just the spirit behind isolated bits of good practice? Is it the future or is it a fad?

The idea that public services should seek to give people a stronger sense of self confidence, autonomy and responsibility to others lies behind RSA initiatives as diverse as Opening Minds and our approach to long term drug users.

For me it is a key plank in pro-social strategy. Maybe it’s because politicians of all parties like the word, but ‘empowerment’ can too easily mean everything and nothing.

Through more of these suppers and the in-depth work of our programme I hope the RSA can add some rigour to the optimism and idealism of those who think a reformed public sector can help more people take greater control of their lives as individuals and community members.

A quick and random thought.

In my office every day I hear two very different views of the world.

On the one side is the world of technology, creativity, social enterprise, and philanthropy.

So much that is exciting is happening at the intersection of business, particularly new business, and social action.

Technology companies, internet billionaires, hedge fund tycoons, ex-presidents and vice-presidents seem to be striding the world setting up new foundations, creating networks, exploring new ways of engaging people in issues like climate change, conflict resolution and African poverty.

The pace of change in our society and the creativity of young people as the drivers of this change are breathtaking.

To hear all this it can surely only be a matter of time before a new and better world emerges…

And yet look at the other axis – between state and citizen, or between different states.

Here the big problems seem stuck or getting worse; disengagement, poverty, climate change, conflict.

In ten minutes before I dash of to the annual dinner of the RSA in Yorkshire I have no idea how to even think about this disconnect.

Is it that all the technology and big business billions are just drops in the ocean?

Is technological innovation really more about making money and pandering to shallow individualism than making the world a better place?

Is it that the state (like many large corporations) and international institutions are simply incapable of operating effectively in today’s complex fast moving world?

The biggest challenges we face can only be met with the right interventions from the state – locally, nationally and internationally – but much of the dynamism in the world (the ideas, the technology, the people) is taking place well away from the formal sites of political authority.

Am I on to anything here?

And should the RSA be trying to find ways of thinking about and overcoming this disconnect?

Having worked for the Labour Party and the Government I hope I can be forgiven being a little emotional. Strictly in my capacity as a former Number 10 advisor I will today do my share of media commentary on the Blair 10 years.

The key question is whether Tony Blair passes on a better country than he inherited?

Labour’s argument is that 10 years ago we saw economic recession as a cyclical inevitability, public services were threadbare with crumbling hospitals, lengthy waiting lists and hundreds of failing schools, and poverty among pensioners and families with children was high and rising.

Certainly much of this seems to have changed. And there have been other aspects of progress including improvements ranging from child care and support to working parents to new rights for gay and disabled people to the urban renaissance in places from Inverness to Bristol, from Leeds to Cardiff.

Over any 10 year period there will be also be mistakes. I would pick out the culture of spin and command and control, the failure to drive reform when the extra public service investment first came on stream, the corrosive bickering of those who claimed to speak for Brown and Blair.

Ask commentators from Europe or America and they will say that Britain is a success story. Even internationally the disaster of Iraq has to be set against the UK’s leadership role on Africa and climate change.

But ultimately Blair’s legacy will depend on whether his successors build on his record. Gordon Brown and David Cameron will distance themselves from the less popular aspects of New Labour but no one is arguing for a fundamental shift from the progressive centre ground on which Tony Blair pitched his big tent.

And this is the opportunity for the RSA. As a determinedly independent organisation it is easier for us to engage and speak to a wide audience at a time of ideological convergence.

Ed Miliband responded positively to my inaugural speech on ‘pro-social’ behaviour and then, last week, David Cameron was here at the RSA talking about the relevance of the idea to the direction he wants to take his Party.

Some people will dislike what they will see as a soggy consensus, but in enabling politics to move beyond old political and policy dichotomies and to start asking more fundamental question about the kind of society we want to live in and the kind of citizens we need to be.

Tony Blair provides a fruitful context for the RSA to become a powerful source of ideas which can engage people of all parties and none.