Lawyers acting for the sacked Haringey children's boss Sharon Shoesmith have demanded that Ofsted release key documents that would shed light on claims that it deliberately "manipulated" performance data in the wake of the Baby Peter furore.
The Guardian revealed on Saturday that a whistleblower had claimed an official report on Haringey children's services was secretly downgraded from "good" to "inadequate" – prompting a call by Barry Sheerman, chairman of the Commons children's committee, for an inquiry to establish whether Ofsted had been under pressure to ensure the council did not get a clean bill of health.
Today Shoesmith's legal team wrote to government lawyers demanding that Ofsted immediately release successive drafts of the 2008 annual performance assessment (APA) report, which is believed to have gone through at least three revisions between November and December 2008, being marked down each time.
They also demanded Ofsted produce copies of the draft versions of a separate Joint Area Review (JAR) report into child protection services in Haringey, which was prepared by Ofsted in November last year at the request of Ed Balls, the children's seceretary. This was highly critical of child safeguarding procedures at Haringey council and in the local NHS.
Shoesmith's legal team claim that Ofsted has so far refused to hand over the drafts of the reports, which they argue would shed light on what changes were made and why.
The former Haringey director of children's services is at the High Court to claim that she was unlawfully dismissed. She alleges that Ofsted failed to allow her to comment on the critical JAR report before it was published, and that its handling of both the JAR and APA reports reflected pressure from the children's secretary, Ed Balls.
She claims that Balls' decision to remove her from her post in December 2008, on the day the JAR was published, was a "kneejerk" reaction to a tabloid media campaign to have her sacked.
Sheerman wrote to Ofsted's chief inspector, Christine Gilbert, last week to demand an explanation for the APA changes. His letter says: "The information provided to me alleges that, at a very senior level, the inspection team were asked to re-evaluate their assessment using the same statistics and information and with no further visits. The report was rewritten with a very different set of scores and commentary."
According to Sheerman, the whistleblower said he had come forward because he had been troubled by Ofsted's behaviour. "Senior managers at Ofsted instructed inspectors to rewrite the report on the same information, changing everything because they were more interested in protecting Ofsted than protecting children," the MP said.
Ofsted said its refutes the allegation that it manipulated any results and said no pressure was put on inspectors to downgrade APA ratings.
Baby Peter died on 3 August 2007. His mother, her boyfriend and his brother were convicted on 11 November 2008 of causing his death, after which media scrutiny turned to the performance of Haringey social services.
The case continues.
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