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December 19, 2024 - 7:00am
On Tuesday, Urfan Sharif and Beinash Batool were sentenced to life for the horrific murder of 10-year-old Sara Sharif. That same day, Bridget Phillipson promised a “landmark” bill which will “seek to keep children safe” by making sure the most vulnerable are not automatically eligible for homeschooling. Sara was pulled out of school twice by her father and stepmother as a ruse to cover up evidence of her repeated beatings, and so Phillipson wants to give councils greater powers to scrutinise home-learning environments.
Given the record number of children being homeschooled, and the generation of “ghost children” currently absent from school, more regulation is not necessarily a bad thing. However, the focus on the role homeschooling played in Sara’s death is a distraction from the jaw-dropping litany of institutional failures which allowed her to be so abused in plain sight.
Instead, we should be asking how a family court gave Urfan Sharif custody of Sara in 2019 despite his long, well-documented history of violence against women and children. In 2013, the year Sara was born, he was accused of burning her sibling with an iron. In 2015, Sara’s mother accused him of serious domestic violence and physical abuse. The court found Sara’s behaviour “disturbing” and “extremely concerning”, but allowed her to live with her father and stepmother — who had also been arrested in 2014 for assaulting a child — anyway.
We should also be scrutinising the utter incompetence of social services, which closed Sara’s case six days after teachers made a referral about bruises on her face. Her parents had been known to social services since 2010, and concerns about her welfare were made within a week of her birth.
Surrey’s children’s services were found inadequate by Ofsted in 2015 and 2018, and in 2019 the Government department warned that the new triage system for dealing with referrals, which was also used in Sara’s case, was not making proper use of children’s data. In the meantime, the council’s chief executive Joanna Killian enjoyed an annual salary of £234,000, while other council bosses were awarded CBEs and MBEs, despite the fact that their services were not providing proper safeguards for children.
We therefore now have another hand-wringing ritual of “never again” and “lessons will be learnt” with entirely the wrong focus. Sara’s death was not preventable because her guardians were allowed to take her out of school: it was preventable because of the same failures we see time and time again. Namely, poor communication and information-sharing between agencies, and a failure to follow up concerns or join the dots before it is too late.
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SubscribeSadly, I do not think Bridget Phillipson’s focus is on making the kind of change required to realistically protect children. Her focus is essentially socialist in nature, and homeschooling is most definitely not part of the socialist utopia of Ms Philipson’s dreams.
She may have good intentions and imagine she can k i l l two birds with one stone – get rid of homeschooling + keep children safe – but, as Kristina explains in the arrticle, she is mistaken.
Homeschooling, in it’s best form, whether traditional Christian, Humanist or purely academic, is a thorn in the side of any socialist inclined government, they want to be indoctrinating all children from a young age.
Is it also possible that ‘cultural sensitivities’ prevented appropriate action being taken?
Homeschooling is a complete red herring. That poor little girl could have just as easily been killed during the holidays.
The authorities failed her because they handed her over to a murderous abuser, not because the law allows parents the option to educate their children outside of the mainstream school system.
The only family we know who homeschool do so because of the sheer awfulness of the state-maintained school their children were attending. Bullying and disruption were so endemic that it was not only impacting the kids ability to learn, it was having a significant detrimental effect on their mental health. The head teacher’s response when they informed the school they were taking the kids out was, effectively, “I don’t blame you”, which tells you everything you need to know.
I suspect may families are in the same position and homeschooling will only increase as more and more families opt out a state school sector which is collapsing under the catastrophic impact of progressive educational approaches.
Regarding inter-agency child safeguarding. This has been an ongoing project since the 2003 Laming Report into the murder of Victoria Climbie. For a while I worked as part of a team supporting public sector bodies to adopt joint working practices under the Children Act 2004 and a lot of good initiatives were introduced, such as information sharing protocols between agencies, co-located mutli-agency teams and so on.
It is very difficult to measure the impact of these changes because its impossible to count the number of serious safeguarding incidents which didn’t happen because of better inter-agency working over the last 20 years. My guess is that they have made a difference but there’s no denying that system breakdown and individual mistakes still tragically contribute to cases such as this.