Should we accept greater state monitoring of families in order to safeguard children?

Yes. I was recently speaking to a Ukrainian refugee who is now living in Britain and is pregnant. She is horrified by maternity care here (she has older children born in Ukraine). She is seriously thinking of returning to Ukraine for antenatal care as she already has for dentistry!

This. Back in the day when I was a community midwife (70s/80s) we visited every day until at least 10 days. We could continue for up to 6 weeks if necessary. HVs would take over and a proper handover was done. A friend of mine had a baby who was in SCBU for weeks and needed cardiac surgery. She said her HV (who had been a paediatric nurse) was a fantastic support right up until the child was 5. I did my training in a small maternity hospital. You had to be a state registered nurse (3 years) with one year's post reg experience before doing midwifery training. Everybody looking after patients had a professional qualification.
I have been appalled at the decline of obstetric care over the last 2 or 3 decades. In some areas there are no community midwives at all. My nieces have had really dreadful standards of care right the way through their pregnancies and post natal periods. Absolutely shameful. Postnatal wards are absolute hell holes and it is a matter of surviving, not recovering.

I'd love to know where in the country people are getting regular HV checks. Where I live you get one, which can happen at any time between baby being born and turning 1, and then nothing. At all. No 1 year checks any more, nothing. When I found out I immediately thought of all the children who will slip under the radar because no one is checking on them, it broke my heart.

Poverty will not be the only factor in the neglect though. Will usually include something else which means the child is unsafe and has been for a long time.

Actually research shows that poverty in and of itself is a huge contribution to child neglect and abuse. It’s very difficult to parent children when you can’t provide basics like housing, heating, food and clothing. The financial pressures undermine parenting capacity, impact mental and physical health, wear away at your resilience as a parent. Whatever else is happening in your life, it’s much easier to cope if you’re not worrying about your leccy bill.

Of course not all parents who live in poverty neglect their children, but poverty creates a landscape that makes parenting much, much more difficult. Tackling child poverty is the one measure guaranteed to reduce the numbers of children at risk of harm.

I also work for a government department and priorities and contracts chop and change depending on media controversy.

Thats part of the problem though services like education, health and social work have been chronically under funded for decades. Every now and then there’s a crisis and the government pop up with a bit of extra money but then the media circus moves on, and so does the money.

They’ll spend inordinate amounts of money on public enquiries and lessons will be learned, but those lessons learned never come with a budget to actually properly finance services to implement that learning. And social services is never top of the list for additional funding, social workers don’t have the professional profile that teaching and nursing do, don’t have a dedicated union that has any teeth so the public are often unaware of the pressures. Until a child dies and then people ask what the hell social work was doing.

Where I am (Scotland) social workers are well paid particularly when newly qualified - salary isn’t so much of an issue. Workloads are horrific though and I’d argue can’t be managed safely, so social workers leave the profession through burnout, or because they’re scared they’ll miss something and a child will die, or more likely they’ll know a child is at risk and they have literally nowhere to put them if they’re removed.

i'm well aware of that, I worked as a social worker. But lets be realistic - very few middle class kids are being taken into care because of neglect.

Poverty will not be the only factor in the neglect though. Will usually include something else which means the child is unsafe and has been for a long time.

I think most under1s have regular interaction with outside agencies. HV, GP, vaccines etc it is expected that any suspicions will Be picked. Which they usually are, wether this changes outcomes is another thing.

until there are more foster places none of the interventions matter. As they will stay with their families

I feel so sad for Sara who was so terribly failed. A beautiful child who deserved so much more 😢 Children should be permanently removed much sooner in my opinion.

I'm home-educate my child & I am a child safeguarding social worker.

I'm massively in favour of greater scrutiny of home educated children.
Nobody WANTS more state intervention in their life, but the benefits of doing so means that fewer vulnerable children will fall through the net.

The issue currently is that if a child is in a mainstream school & there are serious safeguarding concerns, there is no legal way of preventing a parent removing a child from school & home educating, short of removing the child from the parents.
Courts are extremely reluctant to do this without overwhelming evidence.

The new proposed legislation means that social workers / courts will be able to insist a child attends a school & a parent that is physically or sexually abusing their child can't withdraw their child from school to hide them from professionals. This is particularly relevant where there children are on child protection or PLO.

There is a much wider issue with the state of statutory social work in the UK, which has been chronically underfunded for the twenty years I have been qualified.
Social worker morale is often low with a high turnover of staff. Caseloads are high & resources are increasingly scarce.
Social workers are disrespected by other professionals (sometimes justifiably so) & we deal with constant hostility from parents, families & other agencies.

Serious case reviews & inquiries over decades have tried to address the same issues, but there has never been the level of funding needed to transform children's services.

Sara Sharif death is a truly awful tragedy. But if children are going to be adequately protected, more social workers with lower caseloads are needed. Better paid & trained foster carers are needed. Comprehensive support agencies that work long-term with families are required instead of short-term interventions.
It all costs money but the public are not minded to pay more taxes to actually safeguard the children that need it.

Monitoring and referrals are not the issue! There are NO resources to do a single thing.

Have had SS and SAFE involvement for a lot of this year. So far I have yet to have a single issue that I've asked to help with addressed. Not one. Fucking millions of meetings and calls and texts. Checking we are "ok" but that's it.

Didn't want to homeschool. Destroyed our mental health and financial security. Had no choice. No school for both kids. Ended up begging for a place in another LA. Moving again. It's a fucking travesty. Everyone passing the blame.

Those fuckers deserve never to see the light of day, but the government should hang their heads in shame how many families are suffering and neglected - and therefore real safeguarding issues - go unaddressed. I feel sorry for anyone doing that job. Unless you're dead or dying no one cares.

It's two separate issues. I am pro having a register of home educated children. It is bizarre that no one can say how many children are being home educated and that the parents only have to evidence what is going on if asked. There is also zero support for them.

I also don't believe that a register would have made any difference in Sara's case. She was well known to the authorities, even before she was born. The escalation of violence started when she was still in school and someone knocking on the door every so often could easily be denied or fobbed off. Staying in school may have made a difference, or may not, as she was killed in the summer holidays.

Unless vast amounts of money are pumped into the system then nothing will change. I don't see that happening, as we are in a government cost cutting frenzy. I would give anything for someone to be able to provide suitable education for my child, or have social services support for their needs. Instead we got one visit from a lovely, but ineffective, early help person who said parents are engaging, so no help is available and discharged us. If people actively seeking help are denied, people avoiding it will continue to abuse.

Well that would suggest giving more of a budget or prioritisation into social work. It’s not that there’s no money, just how it’s been allocated.

I also work for a government department and priorities and contracts chop and change depending on media controversy. I have no doubt that something will be done about home schooling because of how directly it was called out by the judge and how it has been closely linked and attributed to this case.

Regardless of how underfunded social work is, I think this case has been controversial enough for policy makers to be seen as needing to do something regardless of the depth.

Who's going to do the 'monitoring'?

There's no money to pay for more social workers, too few people working long hours, burning out, leaving the profession.

As OP has said, most children who are killed in the home are below 2. There is no requirement for a child that young to be enrolled in any form of childcare.

There are few chances for concerns to be raised in those first two years. Perhaps the hand full of anti natal appointments the womens attends during pregnancy. Then perhaps the birth and hospital stay after, then maybe 2 x midwife appointments at home. In the first two years a baby/ toddler could have as few as 3/4 HV appointments, with maybe a few questionnaires about development slipped through the door and told to phone if they have any concerns. There’s immunisations and any other medical appointments. These are a very brief snapshot of a child’s life, if you wanted to cover something up it would be very easy to. There’s too little resources to increase visits and give support to everyone, so it needs to be targeted to those high risk families. I.e. households with single mothers, histories of addiction, previous violent convictions, low income and this needs to be kept up to date. I unfortunately see my HV a lot more often due to my daughter’s medical issues, but they haven’t asked if anything has changed in my circumstances since my daughter was tiny. For all she knows her dad left last year and I’ve moved a boyfriend I met last week on tinder in.

I think home schooling should follow a baseline curriculum. In Sara Sharif’s house, she wasn’t home schooled anyway but just to entertain the idea regardless, what were the qualifications of the parents involved to make them suitable to be home teachers?

• Urfan barely speaks English and worked in places like McDonalds, Burger King where he was sacked due to his behaviour then became a taxi driver. He was educated in Pakistan, so had zero knowledge of the English education curriculum. How can he teach something he doesn’t have meaningful knowledge in?

• Batool may have went to school in England but she had 5 other children in that household, some who had significant learning difficulties, plus younger than school-age kids. She had her hands full.

I think the state should question what are the parent’s qualifications and resources to provide homeschooling. I just think if the parents couldn’t necessarily pass GCSEs themselves then how can those same parents prepare children to do so?

We should, and anyway it's monitoring of education, not families per se, so there isn't much argument to be had. Hopefully they'll go far enough to identify those pretending to home educate. Why would good home educators mind?

I think the current home education system is ridiculous.

If a child is in school and their attendance drops below 80 - 90% the parents are harassed and even face court. It's considered a big deal.

Yet a child can NEVER go to school (because they are 'home educated') and no-one cares!

I have no issue with home education but I do think it should be properly monitored to ensure the children are actually being educated and abuse is not occuring.

If you r doing nothing wrong and your children are well cared for and receiving a decent education then you'd presumably have no issues with your child being regularly reviewed and spoken to be social workers and health visitors etc..

I think one huge issue is a lot of families that have issues do not willingly interact with children’s services. Not answering the door/ not attending appointments. Plus social workers are stretched they need more staff. In my experience schools in general need to do more and services need to act faster. But easier said than done it seems.

Maybe we should stop saying lessons should be learnt and actually start learning them. I do safeguarding training level three every year and it's always the same failings. From Victoria Climbie to Sara Sheriff, constant failings to act on concerns and share information. We as a country let vulnerable children down every day. Social services needs a complete overhaul and investment to improve it.

Mandatory parenting lessons. I’ve done them voluntarily and they were brilliant . (Not done the teen one yet)

I am peripherally involved in child protection at work. One of the things that happened locally to me around Covid was that terrible things happened in families not known to social services.

Mothers went home from hospital with their babies and were legitimately not seen for months. In normal circumstances a family member or close friend would have probably taken charge and taken an irritable whingy baby out and sent mum to bed for a few hours, or cooked a decent meal. Somebody might have approached the GP / health visitor, or soft info might have made its way to someone who was concerned enough to see help.....

The problem families continued to have regular face to face contact throughout, but this assumed that they were already on the radar.

I think the difference is that these adults were already flagged. And anyone can see that a child who has bruises who is then removed from school as soon as staff raise concerns about the bruises, should be seen as a high alert safeguarding issue and checke don regularly.

Honestly I do not understand the current myth that children are better off with birth parents, however violent or incapable they are. Clearly she should have been put up for adoption as soon as she was born. She could be thriving now, if she had been.

Until the serious case review is published, we wont know why or how the decisions were made around referrals/thresholds/actions

If it’s made mandatory then new mums will feel like they are being snooped on and it will look upon health visitors with fear incase they are falsely accused of anything. My confidence was already knocked after I had my first baby. I had to go through so much to have him - year of infertility treatment and then when I very nearly lost him due to medical negligence. He was born via EMC after both myself and an agency nurse had flagged concerns that something was wrong (he was in distress and the so-called doctor brushed it off). We both had an extended stay in hospital due to complications. I was traumatised by the whole experience. I can remember feeling absolutely convinced that I would be deemed an unfit mother and that someone was going to take him away from me. I was terrified of the health visitor. Weekly visits would have made me feel like I was being spied on and would probably have put me off having anymore children.