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Education and health were the important topics today in one form or another.

Hearing our items on the 11-plus brought back memories, as I'm sure it does for many others of my age or older.

Although I remember almost nothing about the actual tests (I was too paralysed by concentration to retain anything) I do remember the general 11-plus experience: being very nervous about it for months beforehand, failing to pass the written exam outright, and then receiving an interview for those who were borderline. That interview got me through to a grammar school that subsequently merged with a secondary modern to become a comp three years later.

An important point comes out of this. Abolishing the 11-plus (in most parts of the country) didn't make education across the whole country equal of course. There was and remains a "postcode lottery" by which the area you live in has a major bearing on what standard of education you receive.

So one lesson from the history of the 11-plus is that getting uniform high quality provision is a challenge for a national service.

Reminiscing on that brings me to another great post-war institution - the NHS on its 60th birthday. It is striving with the same issues of uniformity, equality and national control that affect education, with or without an 11 plus.

We talked to the health secretary Alan Johnston today, who's announcing a set of plans for the NHS in England.

Among his priorities is to make the service more local and personal, and to bring more uniform prescribing.

I tried to tease out the possible inconsistencies in these directions with him. It's not easy if the public want services determined locally but they also want an end to postcode lotteries. It's hard to have both.

Interestingly, the more difficult question for Mr Johnston was on his attempt to make the service not more local, but more personal.

For many patients with a bit of money, by far the best and cheapest way to offer a personal service would be to to allow them to buy drugs unavailable on the NHS with their own money. At the moment, they can do that often only by sacrificing their entitlement to other treatment on the NHS during the same treatment episode.

The idea that people can go hang-gliding, break a leg and get free NHS treatment but if they go and take a cancer drug prescribed by a private doctor, they are excluded from the service, is one that is hard to explain.

Mr Johnston was evidently torn in his answer today, between the modern desire that the NHS should be flexible and responsive to what heterogeneous individual patients need; and the ancient value of the NHS that money should not buy you better care lest we end up with a two tier service.

The best Mr Johnston could say about that issue now is that it is being looked at.

The decision we end up with on top-up treatments is perhaps more important long term, than any of those being announced today. It has even been described as potentially heralding the end of the NHS by one group, well-disposed to the idea.

The upside - it costs nothing, improves choice for some patients without harming others. The downside - it does introduce two-tiers.

Of course, some say the abolition of the 11-plus did that for schools years ago - it allows the rich to buy a better state education by buying a house in the right area.