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

[AllYearsAround]

This point has been raised on a few threads in reference to Sara Sharif - that the state should do more monitoring of home educated children if there's a possibility of uncovering abuse and saving a life.

But looking into it, most children killed by a parent or step parent are actually under 1
https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/research-resources/statistics-briefings/child-deaths-abuse-neglect

There have been a few awful cases recently of babies and toddlers being murdered, particularly by mums' boyfriends.

Would it not be more sensible then to put the time and money into monitoring families with young babies? We already have the system in place with health visitors.

Maybe health visitors should be a mandatory service, with regular (weekly? Monthly?) home visits and babies stripped and weighed/examined.

This would surely save many more lives than any additional monitoring of home education.

They are checked on . We do a review every year with a person from our LA . Mine is a very nice and helpful ex teacher . They fill in a full report . And are available throughout the year for any advice or information.

If they have any worries they report it .
We have home educated our eldest for several years now and never had any problems. We take education very seriously. As do all the other home Ed parents we see and speak too.

Maybe they should license parenthood so only the right type of people can have children. Oh wait...

I had the most awful trouble with a health visitor when my DS was small. He had a sleep disorder and couldn't sleep unless I stayed with him to make sure he was breathing. I called the health visitor and she came to visit she hadn't read the text I'd sent explaining the problem, so she didn't know about the sleep disorder.

She took one look at us and jumped to conclusions. She said I had to move him to his own separate room to sleep or "there would be consequences". I rushed down to the GP to ask for his help, but both he and the HV were new in the job and they ganged up on me.

I had to move my child to a separate bedroom which was unsafe for him, just to get them off my back. Then I had to go to the chief health visitor in the country to get her help. When I contacted her I didn't even need to tell her the name of the HV - she already knew who the one bad apple was.

She sorted the HV out and then I was able to help my son sleep safely again. I always went for private healthcare after that. In my experience the state services can be so overstretched as to be actually dangerous.

I don’t honestly know what the answer is but the only exposure and experiences I’ve ever had with social services with that they were people who literally couldn’t have got a job anywhere else.
They couldn’t tie their own shoelaces.
I had a section 7 report requested by the court in a custody residency dispute
And the social worker spent more time in my Bathroom commenting on the size of the Bathroom of a rental property than any other aspect of the report. She was an enormous great big fat thing herself and she actually went out of her way to put in the comment section that the mother turned up wearing gym gear carrying a bottle of water.

It was mind blowing how genuinely thick and simple the person was.

Plenty in school too. That's where the vast majority of them will be.

I home educate but with council supervision through EOTAS. We have a call every week with a very kind man who is a psychotherapist and he helps my DS with medical trauma from his toddler years. It's a great relief to my mind to have a second pair of eyes on our situation. A professional I mean, rather than me just having to manage it all myself.

If all the Home Ed community could access EOTAS provision, none of this would be an issue. The tax budget has about £7.5k every year for the education of each child, and home ed kids are not getting that money.

If they had EOTAS funding to home educate and were just given that bit of money that they should be receiving if they were in school, then they would be able to get much better schooling, and an extra pair of eyes on then. Why are all home ed kids not getting that money? That's what I want to know. Many home ed kids have SEND issues for which there is no suitable school so these kids should be receiving that money and the money would fund the supervision.

Its also the ability to maintain that data, update it all the time, enter all the admin needed, SWs need to be out doing direct work and assessments, visits, getting stuck in traffic, attending to emergencies, but at the same time sat at their desks entering all the information, updating and writing plans, writing court reports, answering constant emails and phone calls and text messages and watsapp messages and teams messages and attending court and attending health appointments and filling out referral forms, the list is literally endless. There is no back up to do this and woe betide you if you're out of timescales to put all this on.

Oh and the system isnt working half the time either due to outages.

🤣 okay

Okay what ?

They certainly don't belong to the state. This is so naive, look at the terrible things that have happened to kids in the foster and residential system.

Home educating parents do not believe their children "belong to them to do what they like with them", that's a shitty thing to say. The law in the UK is parents have a duty to see that their child is educated, in school or otherwise, not a duty to send them to school. Do you think your kids "belong to you to do whatever you want with" because you made the decision to send them to school?

I just watched the entire sentencing hearing.

I must admit I was slightly surprised that the judge specifically called out the authorities with regard to home schooling. It feels like a bit of an agenda is being pushed here - like virtue signalling with this poor girl’s death.

don’t get me wrong, home schooling was obviously a detrimental factor but I think there’s so many other laws and processes that I would campaign against ahead of homeschooling in this case.

But how would that have helped Sara?They were so many reported concerns, and nothing was ever done. She would never have died if a judge hadn't given her back to an already known abusive man. That is the real scandal here and the home education register stuff is just a massive deflection from serious failings in the social services and family courts.

I suggest that the most important thing is to ensure that child protection services whoever they are are properly resourced, trained and given a clear mandate

I wasn’t casting any aspersions on home educators just saying that the state should keep track of kids

Social services need to be able to do more things to support those children in abusive homes.

we need a better fostering system.

we need places for these children to go to.

we need support for those children who have been abused.

Finding them isn’t the problem - we know where they are. It’s doing something about it.

@Scarydinosaurs i agree but all of that costs money. Resourcing social work so that workers carry a realistic case load, they have access to a range of interventions for families, have adequate supervision so they don’t burn out and leave after 6 years in the job, gain the depth of experience needed for really complex situations all costs money.

Paying foster carers a professional salary so the role is attractive, training them to parent deeply traumatised children, monitoring carers to ensure they offer a high standard of care.

Fully assessing kinship carers, providing them with the financial resources and training needed to care for very traumatised children.

Providing adequate income for vulnerable single parents so they can secure adequate housing and feed their kids without resorting to moving some loser bloke in to help pay the bills.

It all costs money and, as much as we mourn these children, no one wants to pay.

I totally agree.

It's easy to say what should happen. Paying for it is a whole other problem.

But this is why all of this “who should we monitor” is not the issue.

There is no doubt about where the vulnerable children are - but when they are identified, we don’t have effective ways of dealing with it.

After every case like this, the number of children taken into care goes up. For some it will be the right decision, but for others it will be a "better safe than sorry" exercise because of the lack of resources and the bureaucracy of allocation. There will be a recruitment campaign for foster carers, and every professional dealing with children will be on high alert, partly in the best interests of children, partly as an arse covering exercise.

Right now I do think the home schooling aspect is being over-egged but to be blunt it's a crowd pleaser, it selects a group of people that are different from the majority and gives people a sense that "something will be done".

The main drivers of child abuse and neglect are poverty and addiction, which are rarely properly addressed at state level. Yes, there are depraved psychopaths out there, but as can be seen, they manage to fly under the radar regardless of systems, processes and oversight - although in the case that is prompting the current threads, it's blatantly obvious it's a whole series of system failures with home education being a red herring, and allowing certain agencies and the judiciary off the hook.

Most families have plenty of oversight in a child's early years, and most families are not abusive. Losing the SureStart initiative has been mentioned as a turning point in declining outcomes for vulnerable children.

I don't think that assuming all children are always at risk and treating families accordingly will identify those genuinely abused, and will further erode what little trust there is in the authorities.

There are posts regularly on here with parents at their wits end appealing for help when things are going wrong, and they describe being passed like a hot potato from one agency to another while risks do increase. See also the education system and all the bureaucracy involved when trying to get SEND children into school, leaving many parents feeling home education is the only option.

No matter which way we slice it, the breakdown of families and communities is being accelerated by the pressures of modern life and financial deprivation, and children suffer in a myriad of ways.

Increasing monitoring without addressing the issues contributing to the reasons why children are being harmed is like sticking a band aid on an arterial spurt.

we don’t have effective ways of dealing with it.

In fairness services do an incredible job with the resources available. From teachers and schools supporting very vulnerable families, nurseries offering a range of support to struggling parents, social workers doing 50/60 hour weeks to get children through the legal maze that is child protection. Many, many children are alive and have measurably better lives through the efforts of professionals working well beyond their remit.

Adding in more monitoring without allocating resources to deal with what they might find is an utter waste of time. Properly resourced funding for children who go unseen is definitely worthwhile.

Just to add, I have met kids in care that have been treated so badly by the care system I couldn't help but feel that they'd have been better kept at home with their parents.

The majority of kids in the Uk who are removed from parents, are removed because of neglect. A large percentage of neglect cases are massively underpinned by poverty. Addressing that poverty directly would actually be cheaper in the long run than bringing children into care. But that unfortunately is not a vote winner.

Children in nursery and school are monitored. We already have our lives 'watched over'. If my child has a bruise when I drop her off at nursery I have to fill in a form to say what happened. So to say this is unfair scrutiny of home ed parents feels ridiculous. Why the secrecy? What is the problem with some oversight? If it saves some children being harmed, or not getting any education then it's worth it.

I was talking to my DSis yesterday about our past jobs. We both worked in education. We both undertook extensive and regular training after Victoria Climbie.

And here we are. More children dying at the hands of people who should care for them the most.

The whole system needs a complete overhaul.

The plans for monitoring Home Ed children are woefully inadequate. Concentrating on children who are already on child protection plans is a safety net that isn't big enough.

Home Ed needs rigorous monitoring. All dc involved in Home Ed should be regularly seen by a local support worker.

We need to train and retain a generation of social workers. Start actually supporting social workers rather than demonise them.

We need to confront the fact that a common denominator in so many abuse cases is the introduction of a new adult into the life of a young child.

And stop saying "lessons will be learned" and actually get on with protecting children.

Sara was known to be at serious risk. Her father was known to have a record of abusing children. The school and social services were well aware of these facts. Yet, there appears to have been nobody tasked with monitoring/ checking on her even when she was taken out of school. I was listening to Tom Swarbrick duscussing this at length on LBC and these points were all raised. All the legislation and systems are already in place but none of it was followed. One awful point raised in court was the fact that the child was made to wear a hijab to hide the injuries. She was 10. No other female in the family wore one. Why did nobody think that was odd? Why is it sensible for the government to give SS the extra work of increasing monitoring of more families when local councils can't or won't pay for safeguarding teams to intervene with the children known to be at serious risk?

I'd gladly accept more monitoring if it protected abused children, but it couldn't work in the current system. Social care is on its knees as it is. There is neither enough money or resources.