It’s one of the busiest days in Christine Gilbert’s working calendar and the press room in her plush offices in central London is packed.

For the third time since she took over as chief inspector for the country’s schools, Gilbert is releasing her inspectorate’s annual report. Dressed in a dark tailored suit with a stiff white shirt and a helmet of blonde white hair she’s every inch the glossy, groomed executive, with just a dash still visible of the history teacher she used to be.

The news is gloomy. More than a third of English schools are failing pupils, according to the Office for Standards in Education, Childrens’ Services and Skills (Ofsted). More than half England’s teenagers leave school without five good GCSEs, including English and maths.

Speaking softly into a microphone, Gilbert sums up the report’s predictable findings; some progress is being made, but too many children are receiving services that are “patently inadequate”. “I'm absolutely not satisfied and I think we could do a lot better,” she said.

But this year it’s not the bleak picture of school standards that is grabbing journalists’ attention. As part of a huge expansion of its work earlier this year, Ofsted now has responsibility for regulating everything from nurseries to children’s homes, child-minders to local council child protection services. Earning a salary reported at £225,000, Gilbert, who is married to cabinet minister Tony McNulty, heads an empire of 2,700 staff with the right to march into classrooms, offices, even boarding-school bedrooms in the quest to discover how children are being taught and treated. Critics, however, say that all too often the inspections are paper-based exercises that fail to find out what is really happening on the ground. MPs have even queried whether Ofsted’s expansion may have made it a huge and complex bureaucracy, “unfit for purpose”.

And last week Gilbert found herself caught up in the nation’s outrage over Baby P, the 17-month-old battered to death under the eyes of social services in Haringey, the north London borough where eight-year-old Victoria Climbié was murdered by her guardians eight years ago.

Ofsted inspected Haringey’s children’s services last year, and concluded they were providing a good service; this was a few weeks after Baby P was found dead in his cot, his spine snapped, chocolate smeared over his bruises in an attempt to conceal them. Despite 60 visits by social workers during which 50 injuries to the child were recorded, Baby P was left with his abusers. His mother, her boyfriend and their lodger have been convicted of causing or allowing his death.

Now Gilbert has been charged with carrying out an urgent two- week investigation into what went wrong in Haringey. So what has she discovered and how did Ofsted apparently get it so wrong? “I can’t talk about the [two-week report] until we publish it [early next month],” she said.

Of Ofsted’s earlier inspection of the borough, she said: “We did a report in 2006 and in that we criticised the child-protection work that was going on in Haringey: we found that they did not have enough social workers. By the time of our assessment [last year], they had managed to demonstrate to us that they did have more social workers and so the assessment went up a grade.”

Who should shoulder the blame for Baby P’s death? Should Sharon Shoesmith, director of children’s services in Haringey, be sacked?

Gilbert sidesteps the question. Her job, she says, is simply to report on what happened. “The legislation is pretty clear about the role of the director of children’s services . . . there is a highly prescribed set of duties around the role. There are statutory responsibilities.” Beyond that she will not be drawn.

But, she points out, Baby P is not an isolated case. Her annual report published last Wednesday reveals that each week up to four children die of abuse or neglect in England – 282 children died in the 17-month period to the end of August, many of them known to social services.

On Baby P she said: “I wish I could guarantee that such a tragedy will not happen again but I fear it will.”

So is it the system that is at fault, I ask. After all, following Victoria Climbié’s death there was a huge reorganisation of local councils, with education and social services merged into giant departments, each headed by a newly created executive – a director of children’s services. The idea behind this “joined-up thinking” was to ensure that wherever child abuse was noticed – by teachers in schools, by health workers or midwives or social workers – it would be acted upon. Never again would a child die under the eyes of officials.

Shoesmith, ironically, was one of the first directors of children’s services to be appointed. Yet the joined-up thinking clearly hasn’t worked – in Haringey at least. In the case of Baby P, police seem to have disagreed with social workers about what action should be taken. One doctor who saw the toddler a day before he died even failed to diagnose that the baby’s spine had probably already been snapped.

Does she think the bureaucracy needs rethinking? No, she says firmly. “We need to mend the gaps, make what we have work better. One of the strongest messages coming out of our reports is that there has been real progress – I know that it is hard for me to say that, given Baby P’s death. It would be a pity if that progress were lost.”

People needed to speak out, she said, if they were worried about how a child was being treated. Recently she received a letter which alleged that children with learning difficulties were being made to clean their school. “It wasn’t abuse like Baby P, nevertheless I would count it as inappropriate behaviour,” she said. She sent her inspectors in to find out what was really going on.

And for Gilbert that’s the job. School standards may barely rise year on year; children may die because public-sector workers fail to act. For Gilbert the task is to inspect and report back. She doesn’t want to sound complacent, but worries that the Baby P case will mean “there will be a greater shortage of social workers, frightened off from doing this really important job”.

In Haringey and across the country, many people have rather different concerns arising from the toddler’s death.

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