The Sara Sharif case: what is the point of taxpayers funding these failing organisations?

Whilst not impossible that would necessitate the police, potential forced entry and arrest is pretty risky for all sorts of reasons- not least the level to which the parents who don’t have a hard dead child upstairs could make future cooperation difficult.

I think it’s one of those professions, like most really, where people who don’t do it think they have all the answers with no experience.

Who do we let. Near vulnerable people then? No one?

I keep reading of examples where parents will say child is poorly or out so can't be seen and they are there injured in the house. I remember the head of the Victoria Climbie inquiry got really emotional thinking about her lying cold and alone in a bathtub while the social worker got turned away downstairs. That should trigger an automatic house check if there are concerns over a child's welfare.

Yeah, but if they are not doing their very important jobs properly they should not be anywhere near vulnerable people.

It shouldn't be a choice between one and the other. Increased investment in children's social care wouldn't and shouldn't mean more children being removed, it should mean more children being safe at home. We need resources (including people) to properly support families to make changes before children have to be removed. We also need more foster carers so that when children do have to be removed they can be placed in high quality family homes near their families with proper matching in place. We need more, and we aren't going to get it.

There was a review of home education in 2009. Changes were recommended. I don’t think one has been implemented. There are a lot of loud voices in home education that appear to push back against any criticism. A lot of them tend to be loud white middle class voices, and so get listened to.

But surely, given Lammy and Starmer have been personally held accountable for prison accidental releases, then the people going to jail should be the politicians in office at the time?

We home educate in Italy where strict regulations, and yearly in person exams take place at the school. I can see endless opportunities to hide abuse, even under these supposedly strict conditions, not least because the schools are disorganized.

They have a culture of letting things slide, and making excuses because there are so many kids to cater for within the school, that reaching out to home Ed kids is way down on their priorities.

We actively try to engage with them, but it does seem a bit pointless. If I'm honest, I think they like the ego boost of a bit of authority, but as soon as it requires any action on their part it never materializes.

Our current example being that we had to pay a private school, to do the yearly exams forced upon us by the LEA, because the local school had completely failed, despite three reminders, to include our kid in the exam schedule.

We aren't ideological home schoolers, we did it because of language issues, but I can't help but describe the school/LEA as a shambles. My door is wide open for home visits and checks, but they wouldn't make any difference to anything.

I can't see how anyone can teach or learn in such a poorly organized mess, and the idea that they might spot anything in the community is a joke.

Yep, and if you every read the outraged threads when a nursery or school has 'wrongly' referred a family to social services it's clear most people absolutely would not want professionals to have more legal rights to intervene in their families.

So you’d take the two education workers and put them in jail? Or the court judge who ignored the social workers report repeatedly and refused to allow this child to be removed - you’d put him in jail too? Or is it just social workers who should be held to account?

One thing people tend not to like thinking about is that part of this issue is about where we want our mistakes to be located. In any system involving people, there'll be human error. That's a given.

So part of what we need to think about is whether we want a system leading towards more heavy monitoring and involvement, which means the fuck ups will be removing more kids who shouldn't have been removed (and bear in mind our foster systems don't keep kids safe). Or whether we want one in the other direction, which means the fuck ups will be leaving kids who'd have been safer being taken away even in a system that fails looked after children as badly as ours. At the moment we're more towards the latter but that's for cost reasons. People don't actually want to pay for the resources it would take.

No, what would happen is that no one would ever choose to work as a social worker in child protection. It is already a massively understaffed system. Would you want to do it?

They don’t work in isolation, but their records systems are completely separate. Parents involved with services often move fairly frequently to avoid detection and because they know it can take time for all the services to record new addresses etc.

This couple removed the child from school, were evasive with professionals, moved house - they were determined to harm the child and while it’s right that we consider where professionals failed to protect, we also need to recognise how limited those services are in what they can do. It’s very easy to cast judgement sitting with your coffee on a Friday morning, very different when you’re literally balancing which job won’t get done today and hoping the child will be ok at the end of it, but you have 20 other kids all of whom are in the same position.

If we did bring in a policy like that, as soon as the inevitable exodus from social work and increase in deaths began, maybe we should then punish anyone who was stupid enough to call for it.

You'd see a massive rise in tragic cases as no one would risk becoming a social worker any more.

There aren't enough social workers to manage the children who are actively at risk but you want them to start visiting every single family that starts home educating?

You want to jail individual social workers? Right, that will fix it 🙄

I don’t know what the criteria for home education is, but it should be that you are not permitted to do so until there has been a safeguarding visit from social services.

I don’t think people who are legitimately home educating would really not be able to show that was their intention.

These disgusting people were actively deceptive. There were various points where they actively lied. They are responsible for this horrific death, but a lot of very well qualified people do not seem to have considered that point at all. Abusers are liars. They aren’t just ignorant people who need help. They do know what they do is wrong. They lie to hide it. The latitude these people got in court was unbelievable. The judge was credulous. Whoever it was that granted this order did not ask or test this enough.

Yep!

This sort of thing costs a lot of money, uses substantial resources and there's no clear societal will to pay for it.

Baby P was supposed to be the never again moment in these tragic cases. Yet dozens more vulnerable children have died needlessly since. I have a feeling that if there was individual accountability and the actual people making the fatal decisions in these departments ended up in the dock themselves, far more would be done to make sure these children were not put in dangerous situations in the first place and we would soon see a drop in these tragic cases. All the time the individuals who are failing these children and making such poor decisions do not have to face individual accountability for their actions, this will happen again and again. Baby P wasn’t the last. Sara won’t be the last either.

Yet they never are. Look at all of the past headlines and when have they ever learned?

As someone who has complained about children's socail care and had my case upheld by the LGO, none of the things in my complaint have ever changed. All the following socail workers bar one have done exactly the same thing.

When I put my complaint in, the manager of socail care didn't know if they should be doing that thing. We aren't under child protection and never have been. However we are under the same team managers as Sara.

We have had a string of agency SW who come and go like the wind. The LA said they can not hold agency staff to account. So much more I could say but so many are aware in senior positions of power. None have ever cared.

Rachel Wardel got her OBE during this. You never hear her name in relation to this case

They did and they made a new appointment for September. Home education visits aren't time sensitive, they are often annual or done in writing.

Mad that you would read the post just above you about how social workers have 20/25 children to manage and decide they are lazy.

Could you honestly safeguard 20 children effectively?

Agreed. Those two sub-humans are a waste of oxygen and precious resources. It’s unarguable that the world would be a better place without them in it.

Why not make a few phone calls and track down the right address? That’s what anyone would be expected to do in any other job.