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.
Phillipson therefore needs to think less about bureaucracy and more about the big picture. What is required is an integrated information system allowing agencies to more efficiently identify, track and share information about children, similar to the database ContactPoint, which was questionably scrapped by the Coalition Government in 2010. Homeschooling is an easy target, but there are many other factors behind Sara’s death: overstretched services, bystander neglect, cultural oversensitivity. If we want to improve child protection, then we need to deliver more coordinated and consistent support — but also greater accountability for those who fail so tragically in their duty.
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SubscribeIs it also possible that ‘cultural sensitivities’ prevented appropriate action being taken?
Dressing Sara in a hijab was almost certainly an attempt to hide bruising and marks on her body. Dressing a 10-year-old girl in a hijab, when her mother and stepmother did not wear any type of veil should have been a massive red flag. The school however could not have questioned the right of parents to dress their daughter in this way.
Another red flag for teachers is when parents stop children from doing PE lessons, as bruising and marks are likely to be exposed by children changing or through physical activity in lighter clothing. I haven’t seen any comment on whether Sara did PE at school or not. I suspect she stopped doing PE when she started wearing the hijab.
I can’t be sure. However, on a balance of probabilities I doubt that the abuse would have remained hidden for so long, had the parents not been Muslim.
It’s reminiscent of poor Kyra Ishak, also put into a hijab and taken out of school for ‘home schooling’ and who subsequently died of starvation in her home.
Neighbours saw her eating breadcrumbs from the bird table and told social services who tried to visit but gave up when they couldn’t gain access to the house.
Instead of redoubling their efforts, they utterly failed her.
From what I can see, Muslim women often take up the hijab when they are grown – but their kids, for the most part, are dressed just as any other kids in the West.
So it really ought to be a bit of a red flag.
Sadly, 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.
She hates it if any child does well academically. This is why, as well as attacking independent schools, she also refuses to praise the best achieving state school in the country.
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.
Her body was found on 10 August, right in the middle of the holidays, and she was killed shortly before then. So home schooling is entirely irrelevant.
So, the other week it was smacking now it’s homeschooling? Any takers on rap music or video games before we complete our red-herring, moral-panic bingo cards?
‘overstretched services, bystander neglect, cultural oversensitivity’
You forgot the peculiarly toxic world of Islam, with its long-standing tradition of child marriage, honour killing and imprisonment of women within burkas, niqabs and hijabs. This girl’s death fits right into all that.
Surely the real underlying problem is the eroded sense of responsibility felt by ordinary people. Don’t interfere with your neighbours; the state will intervene. I’m not suggesting the solution is less state interference per se. That would be useless without a complete reset of general societal expectations.
A neighbour was interviewed on TV and to my mind seemed quite open and honest. Someone who felt shame and not having acted would probably have declined to be interviewed.
The neighbour’s only contact was to watch Sara play in the garden from her own window next door. She said that the girl had looked unhappy, but that from a distance she had seen no sign of abuse. Presumably the parents took care to ensure that her attire hid any signs of abuse. I’m not sure what she could have done. Social services are unlikely to respond to a call saying a child looks unhappy from 20 yards.
There was also plenty of child abuse when people did know their neighbours.
I recently received an email from Social Work England heralding another great your fro social work; it isn’t. In a statutory role, it is not a question of whether a social worker will burnout, it is more a question of when. The pressure is immense; it is a job that is never completed. So much time is spent filling in forms and assessments which will often never be read. The cultural difficulties do not extend only to our sensitivities but the huge chasm between the lived experiences of a social worker from, say, Zimbabwe, and a British family living in poverty. Social workers are reviled more often than they are respected but like the police, they are almost always starting from a place of wanting to help.
This article is disingenuous. Had Surrey social services been competent, Sara’s parents would have had even more reason to remove her from school. In fact it would have been a pre-requisite to being able to continue to abuse her, because any report of bruising from the school would have triggered an investigation by social services.
At no point does the author consider why children are home-schooled, as only a very small proportion of parents are equipped to educate their children in a full range of subjects. The reality is that most children are not ‘home-schooled’ but ‘kept-at-home’. In many cases, there is a good reason for parents to decide reluctantly to do this. Children are bullied at school or attacked on the way home to and from school. However, there are other reasons. Parents don’t want the bother of getting their children up in the morning or often getting themselves up. Parents don’t want the bother of encouraging their children to behave at school. Parents want their children to work in the casual economy. Parents do not want their children to have sex education or they want their children to get married. Parents do not want their children in an environment which values gay people. Children move out of their parental home to avoid sexual or physical abuse, but don’t want the authorities to know. I don’t know what proportion falls into each category. I don’t know if it is possible to do the research and find meaningful results. However, anyone taking a strong position on home schooling should start from a position of being informed and not pretend that the majority of children being home-schooled will achieve average educational standards.
I’d like to see more evidence too.
The only home schooled children I know have well above average educational standards and the parents definitely didn’t choose this option because they were lazy or didn’t car (in fact, the exact opposite). We’d never have done this, but it’s worked out well enough for that family. But that’s only a sample of one and there might be parents that do behave as you say. Sceptical that it would be a majority though. And if it were, it wouldn’t really be what I would call “home schooling”, but rather “home non-schooling” and simply neglect and child abuse (depriving their children of an education).
Agree that homeschooling is not to blame and that the Labour Government is using this as an excuse to expand the reach of the state (along with VAT on private schools, and forcing the national curriculum on academies). To which point, I believe there should be a very high bar for the state to remove a child from a home, and we are in danger of learning the wrong lessons from tragedies like this.