Youth justice may eventually be brought within the remit of the Department for Education and Skills, children’s minister Margaret Hodge has indicated.

In her first speech since her appointment, at a Local Government Association conference, Hodge was asked about young offenders being separated off from mainstream children’s services.

She said this was not the intention. "Many of the services offered by the Home Office are working well and in the short term it would have been unhelpful to move them.

"It may well be that over time we go further, but this is a huge chunk we’ve bitten off. Let’s get this right and make sure we are able to deliver integrated services."

Hodge is heading a new directorate in the DfES which includes Sure Start and early years, the Children and Young People’s Unit and Children’s Fund, Connexions and youth work, the careers services, child protection and children in care, parent support services, family law, Cafcass and the court welfare service, homelessness and social exclusion among young people and extended schools.

One objective of the new unit was the mainstreaming into all services of the lessons of targeted programmes such as Sure Start.

"The opportunities we are developing for some children must be available for all children," said Hodge. "That is partly about resources but it is also about all of us changing the way we work and changing the way we use resources."

She added that the cultural changes demanded of professionals to work in these new ways was challenging and acknowledged the role of training in helping to embed change in the workplace. "We must value the different strengths of different professional backgrounds, but recognise the importance of multi-agency delivery," she said.

Hodge hinted that the green paper on children’s services would propose a children’s commissioner for England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have already established such posts.

She apologised for the disappointment caused by the delay to the green paper but said the fact that the prime minister wanted to be personally involved in its launch was "a very good thing".

The official explanation for the delay to the paper until after the summer recess is that Tony Blair wishes to be personally associated with it, and would be "standing beside" Hodge when it was lodged. His commitments made this impossible before parliament’s summer recess, which began on 17 July. But it has also been said that the DfES asked for the delay because they wanted to make a bigger contribution to the draft.