The following statement was made by the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, Ruth Kelly on 13 December 2005 :

In July 2005 I launched a consultation on the creation of a single inspectorate for children and learners. I am today publishing my conclusions in the light of the responses. I am grateful to everyone who responded to the consultation and I have taken careful consideration of the points made, developing my proposals significantly in the light of those comments.

I intend to proceed, as proposed in the consultation, to establish an enlarged Ofsted. This will be achieved by bringing together in Ofsted the children's social care remit of the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI), the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (CAFCASS) inspection remit of Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Court Administration (HMICA) and the inspection remit of the Adult Learning Inspectorate (ALI). The enlarged organisation will have the formal title of the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills.

ALI, CSCI and HMICA have played vital roles in driving up standards in their respective sectors. But I am convinced of the benefits to users and providers of services of an inspectorate that can look across a wide range of services as they affect children, young people, families and adult learners.

The enlarged Ofsted will be able to follow learning from early years through to adult and work-based settings. It will support the needs of employers and business whilst at the same time sustaining focused, high-quality inspections of standards in our schools and, building on existing activity, across wider services for children, including social care for vulnerable children and young people.

The changes also reflect the drive to integrate services around improving outcomes for the user, for example through the integration of local services for children as set out in the Green Paper, "Every Child Matters" and the bringing together of academic and vocational learning outlined in the 14–19 White Paper. It is part of the wider reform of public service inspection to focus on needs of users, generate improvement in the services inspected, and help deliver better value for money.

Inspection and regulation have been powerful levers for improvement in services for children and learners in recent years. As we move into the next stage of inspection reform it will be essential to build on the strengths of current arrangements and the expertise of existing inspectorates, but also to reflect current and planned changes in the pattern of services, new arrangements for performance management and accountability and our increasing knowledge about what makes for effective inspection and regulation.

The Government will continue to work closely with inspectorates and others to ensure an effective transfer of inspection remits.

Terry Hoon has sent us this commentary :

There is nothing in the Secretary of State’s statement which is exceptionable, is there? It is part of the Government’s current thinking to reduce the number of inspectorial bodies and to simplify. This surely must be commendable. A single organisation must be able to speak more authoritatively. And if the overheads of the combined organisations are reduced, so much the better.

The decision nonetheless leaves me appalled. It is typical of the way that politicians think they know best and keep on re-organising everyone else. Over the last twenty-one years, the inspectorial services have been re-organised time and again.

In 1984 the Registered Homes Act gave local authorities greater powers and clearer guidance to inspect. This legislation lasted for some time. More recently, it was decided that local authorities were too inconsistent and that national standards needed to be applied, and so the National Care Standards Commission was set up. That had only just got going when it was overtaken by the Commission for Social Care Inspection in 2003. And now it has been announced that the whole lot is going to be rolled up into Ofsted.

What Ministers never seem to take into account is that these organisations are staffed by humans. Every time they produce a grand plan of this sort, a whole lot of people lose their jobs and retire early; their skills and experience are lost to the service for good, and paying them off wastes money. Everyone who is staying on spends a year or two, first scrabbling round trying to find a suitable niche in the new organisation and then settling in, building up new working relationships and learning their new job. Even if they have been transferred over to a comparable post, their managers will probably have a different approach, all the main policies will be rewritten, and the whole outfit will have a different feel to it.

During the transition there will be chaos as far as the punters being regulated are concerned, as no one will be certain of the new systems and policies, they won’t know who to contact and the inspectors won’t be sure of their ground.

Even when the dust has settled, with such a huge monolithic inspectorate, there will be big problems as it lumbers along, trying to agree corporate policies that can be applied in every setting. It will waste time trying to communicate throughout the whole of its workforce. There will continue to be anomalies which will take ages to sort out. There will be discrepancies between the interpretations put on standards by different inspectors, and clarification will only lead to more and more complex processes. Making the overall decisions there will no doubt be general managers who haven’t a clue about the specialist teams they manage.

There is a real danger to morale within the new organisation. It has been said that the National Health Service has been re-organised so many times that its staff have ended up trying to provide high personal standards of work, but with their loyalty to the Service as a whole seriously undermined. The number of recent reorganisations of the inspectorates may well have achieved the same result, and it could take ten or twenty years for its workforce to settle down again.

Governments seem to think that reorganising things makes them better. Generally it simply messes them up. What makes things work is the fine-tuning and the working relationships established by the staff. These things take time. Certainly, the established order needs a shake-up once in a while, but not three times in three years. That smacks of a serious lack of foresight and planning on the part of the Government, civil servants or both.

The Secretary of State has spoken, so it will happen. We can only hope that no one tries to re-organise the service again for at least two decades.