Taking responsibility for inspecting children’s services did not seem such an enormous stretch for Ofsted when it was given the job in April 2007. It was already responsible for inspecting about 24,000 schools, 12,000 nurseries and 65,000 childminders. How much more work would 150 local authorities present?

However, it has been a bruising experience. The first sign of trouble came when inspectors gave Haringey Council a top three-star rating in the autumn of 2007, a few months after the death of Baby Peter. Yet when details emerged after the trial, the lead inspector discovered that it was “the worst I had ever seen”. Ed Balls was defensive. “Ofsted had learnt a lesson,” he said.

Earlier this year Sir Roger Singleton, the newly appointed child protection tsar, used an interview in The Times to call on the regulator to “raise its game”. He said that he could no longer ignore what he was hearing from social workers, that former school inspectors simply did not know their way around understaffed children’s services departments where judgment, not paperwork, is all. Social workers used their annual conference to protest at the amount of form-filling they have to do — up to 80 per cent of their time was spent serving the “bureaucratic machine”.

The last thing a new Conservative government would want is to create another quango, but opposition MPs are considering whether Ofsted should be stripped of its new role and an independent inspectorate established.

Being forced to apologise to the High Court and spending taxpayers’ money on legal fees for failing to produce documents will not help it hold on to its new responsibilities.

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