During the three years of coalition government, Michael Gove has effectively nationalised the secondary school system while claiming to be doing the opposite, with the tacit agreement of his Lib Dem ‘partners'.

It now seems that, having virtually ignored children's services, Mr Gove is going to take them down the same road.

What will make the difference is their level of willingness to use new powers and freedoms to attract investment and shape their economic future.

Within hours of his appointment, Michael Gove set about creating a department of two, very unequal halves.  He turned the Department for Education (DfE) into a department for schools (on the one hand) and children's services (on the other) while ridding himself of the Youth Justice Board altogether.

Within 14 days civil servants were busy dispatching letters to outstanding schools offering them freedom (from local authority control, from following the national curriculum, from fixed length of terms and school days, to spend money the council spent on their behalf, to set their staff's pay and conditions) and autonomy in unequal measure, guaranteed, within two months by the 2010 Academies Act.

In fact, most early converters made the dash simply for the cash, with hundreds of thousands extracted from local authority budgets and tucked behind the ring-fence that protected the schools budget.

The promised reductions in bureaucracy included a bonfire of quangos.  Michael Gove, keen to flex his muscles, first lit the branches piled around the British Education Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA), followed, in short order, by the Training and Development Agency, the General Teaching Council, QCDA, YPLA, SFT, SSSNB, etc etc.

Their work was taken in-house by a new raft of DfE executive agencies: lone civil servants, hand-picked by the secretary of state, replaced the quasi-autonomous boards and chief executives.

Mr Gove also hand-picked the DfE non-executivedirectors, with Lord Hill and then Lord Nash slotted into the Lords to look after his narrow educational interests.

Meanwhile, children's services were left to wither, nationally and locally.  Within the DfE, the head count plummeted and joint working with other departments was dismantled

At the local level, any ring fences for children's services were removed as they were forced to compete with street lighting and road sweeping for their share of a much reduced budget.  Local authorities were given ‘freedom': to choose which services to cut, with Sure Start centres, youth clubs and libraries closing as social workers, careers advisers, youth workers and family support workers picked up their P45's.

Children's services departments, with significantly reduced budgets but increasing demands, were left struggling to cope, with child protection hitting the headlines again and again.  Being a director of children's services – starved of staff and resources – became for many, like a temporary job.

The death of very young children at the hands of their carers is a major problem, with police and health incapable of working together with local authorities to protect such vulnerable children.  Trafficking children for sex is another major issue in an unknown number of communities, with the perception in some local authorities and police forces (that sexually abused under age children are making a lifestyle choice) implicitly condoning what is clearly illegal.

The secretary of state's response to these real crises in children's services has been slow, to say the least, other than to withdraw his support from the Children's Improvement Board.

His ‘refreshed' ministerial team has focused, but failed, on worsening childcare ratios and also on speeding up adoption (which, while vital, will only affect a small minority of children in care and an even smaller proportion of those in contact with children's services).

At last, Michael Gove felt obliged to take action in Doncaster, following devastating reports on children's services. His solution?  To appoint a commissioner, who will head a trust that will be independent of the local authority and will, presumably, be accountable to the secretary of state.

With the DfE increasing the pressure on Birmingham, Sandwell and the Isle of Wight, there are, no doubt, those who see the Doncaster model as the future.  This would be consistent with the secretary of state's approach to schools and his determination to underfund and undermine the role of local authorities.

But, and this is a big but, there are very real, and one would have thought, obvious, differences between schools and children's services.

Dismantling the local authority role as the middle tier in education, with academy chains, the churches, and for-profit providers, willing to take over, and Ofsted establishing a regional prescence, is almost complete in the secondary sector.

Primary schools are much less willing converts, but the DfE has ways…

Believing a similar model can be rolled out in children's services shows, at best a staggering naivety.  It is much more difficult to de-couple children's services from the local community, in which the most vulnerable children and their families live.

On a pragmatic level, there is not the hunger to set up ‘children's homes academies', nor an Ark or a Harris eager to set up a chain.

Michael Gove is certain that he is right in his approach to schools, in spite of votes of no confidence from academics, head teachers, teachers, the list goes on.

I am certain he is wrong in his approach to children's services, in common with the vast majority of the children's sector. 

Decoupling adult and children's services so that one is run from Whitehall and the other from the town hall is a recipe for disaster on a grand scale.

Putting children's services back in a single social services department is the lesser of two evils: nationalising one while retaining local control of the other is pure madness.

As the then executive director of the Association of Directors of Children's Services, I welcomed the establishment of the Department for Children, Schools and Families and the profile given to the children's agenda.

Michael Gove has willfully neglected children's services and squandered the gains made.  His latest decision reveals a secretary of state whose prime interest is political, not the effectiveness of the services he is supposed to lead.

It is only his removal from the DfE (unlikely) or the removal from the DfE of children's services (also unlikely) that might lessen the despair in the sector.

It is not only little children that are suffering under his stewardship!

Given his treatment of children's services, were it not for the damage that would occur to children and their families, there would be a case for appointing 150-odd children's commissioners, all directly accountable to the secretary of state.

Being accountable for the reality rather than just re-cycling the rhetoric might be salutary.