I'm scratching my head to recall a time when the education department was as beleaguered as it is now. Crash. Malfunction. System frozen. Not even in the run-up to Estelle Morris's resignation - a situation which Ruth Kelly's current plight echoes in many ways - can I remember it being quite so chaotic, writes Will Woodward. The DfES is on a frantic computer and paper chase to discover exactly how many sex offenders have been allowed to stay in teaching. And every day they delay, the ministerial torment continues.
Though the officials were flapping like crazy underneath during Morris's various problems over A-levels and the Criminal Records Bureau, most of the time the civil servants maintained a "business as usual" po-face. Not this time.
It's said that the job of home secretary is the most hazardous in government. Quite apart from contending with a tricky policy agenda, at the Home Office crises can fall out of a clear blue sky: a terrorist threat, a prison bust, a criminal justice disaster. The Department for Education and Skills now seems to be prey to the same problem. It now has control of virtually all the children's services agenda, with overall responsibility for childcare and inspection. The joined-up government demanded by Sir Michael Bichard, who led the Soham inquiry, is expected to be carried out largely within the DfES. The department is regulating as never before, seizing powers from local authorities, the Department of Heath, and the Home Office itself. Right now, it seems ill equipped to do so.
Why has this happened? It shows that Kelly, red box crammed with papers, has to take too many individual decisions; the difficult problems filter upwards and she has to take them quickly, albeit on the basis of advice from senior officials. Whether or not she should have allowed convicted sex offender William Gibson to stay in teaching (and the balance of evidence seems overwhelmingly that she shouldn't have), it's hard to believe that she gave the decision the time it deserves.
Kelly isn't the only secretary of state to suffer from this kind of problem; it's an institutional weakness in British governance. But other aspects are making her life more difficult. The transfer of responsibilities from other departments to the DfES has not gone altogether smoothly. She has a new permanent secretary, David Bell, the former Ofsted chief who has replaced Sir David Normington (who has moved to be permanent secretary at the Home Office itself. Should be nice and quiet there). She is only 13 months into the job herself and has yet to show sure-footedness. And most of all, she is charged with getting a hugely contentious and unpopular schools white paper in some kind of shape for the forthcoming education bill.
Her next statement on the sex offenders furore - expected on Thursday - is likely to determine her future. Convince the Commons that she has got a handle on the problem, and she will be safe. But Kelly isn't the kind of minister you expect to deliver with a bravura dispatch box performance. And because of the white paper, there is no great reservoir of goodwill for her on the Labour backbenches.
- Will Woodward is editor of Education Guardian
