Calls for home-schooled children to be registered after Sara Sharif murder
Sara Sharif was taken out of school after teachers noticed bruises on her chin and eye
Sir Keir Starmer is facing calls to introduce a mandatory register of all home-schooled children in light of Sara Sharif’s brutal murder.
Children’s charity Coram said a register for children learning from home must be a “minimum” standard following the guilty conviction of Sara’s father and stepmother.
“More children in home schooling means more children out of sight of the authorities and heightens the risk that instances of harm and opportunities for vital support will be missed.” She also called for a change in the law to ban smacking,” said charity CEO Dr Carol Homden, who also calling for a law change to ban smacking.
Her comments come after the children’s commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, said it was “madness” that children who were at risk of abuse at home could be taken out of school.
She also pressed for the government’s upcoming Children’s Wellbeing Bill to include a home education register, and added: “It must say that if a child is suspected of abuse, they cannot be educated at home. Being in school is a safeguard, and actually they are safer under the eyes of teachers.”
Sara was beaten to death four years after her father Urfan Sharif was awarded custody, despite accusations of abuse against him. Authorities failed to identify Sara was at risk for years before her broken and battered body was discovered at her family home in Woking in August 2023.
Sara was withdrawn from school on 17 April 2023 after teachers reported seeing her with bruises on three occasions. On one occasion, Sara’s teacher asked the schoolgirl about two distinct bruises on her chin and right eye. She was then home-schooled in the months leading up to her death.
Following the verdict, a Downing Street spokesperson said that the government will introduce a new duty on parents to get local authority consent to home-school children if the child is subject to a protection plan.
“We clearly need answers as to how this could have happened. We’re focused on doing everything within our power to stop this type of terrible crime happening again,” the spokesperson said.
Speaking to broadcasters, Keir Starmer said that the rules on smacking didn’t have anything to do with Sara Sharif’s death. He said: “This is about violence. It’s about abuse. It’s about making sure that (there are) protecting safeguards for children, particularly those being home-schooled. So that’s where I think the questions are.”
The calls for action come as a new report finds that more than 480 children in England died or were seriously harmed by abuse or neglect.
Data from the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel revealed that 485 children were harmed in serious incidents between April 1 2023 and March 31 2024.
Panel chairwoman Annie Hudson said the design of the child protection system must change, calling for the implementation of multi-agency children teams in every local authority.
There were 330 serious incident notifications received by the panel relating to the 485 children.
Almost almost half of those were for children who died (46 per cent) and more than a third involved babies under one.
More than half of incidents involving the death or serious harm of a child under five involved a parent or relevant adult with a mental health condition (57 per cent), while 16 per cent of children died by suicide – with 92 per cent of the children who took their own lives recorded as having a mental health condition.
The report highlighted the need to support children with mental health needs, with more than a fifth involved in the notifications found to have a mental health condition – most of them aged between 11 and 17 but the youngest aged six.
It also called for greater measures to improve partnerships between adult and children mental health services to protect pre-school aged children whose parents suffer from poor mental health.
According to the data, 43 per cent of incidents featured a parent with an addiction to, or who misuses, alcohol and/or drugs.
Almost a quarter of serious incidents occurred outside the home by people who were not a member of the child’s family, including gang violence, child sexual abuse and child criminal exploitation.