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.

Absolutely not.

but we do need greater investment in child services. The failures are due to them being over worked and under resourced.

It seems like tragic failure on the part of the school and social services. The priority should be addressing why these systems failed so terribly.

And yet the money is available to private landlords to rent properties for private agencies to look after children within.
Without being too outing, we live near the “life Project” on the Wirral. They were renting one of my houses out for four times the market rate and I was assured if there was so much as a scratch on the property it would be repaired to a high standard afterwards.
This was on a three month rolling Contract. £6,000 a month.

And then there was the person living in the house with the child salary on top. They had no bills food or entertainment to pay for out of their wages that was all covered.
And two members of staff have been convicted of assault of SEN children I believe.

What a fine example of the profession

The Scottish government tried to introduce this with the Named Person scheme a few years ago and once the ramifications of the intrusion on privacy and family life became apparent there was enormous and widespread opposition in Scotland along with court cases and they had to back down.

monitoring law abiding families only removes resources from those who need it.

It annoys me that the finger is being pointed at the Home Education community. It's being used as an excuse to force kids into school.

The school and Home Ed didn't fail this poor little girl, it was a lack of funding for Social Services.

No...
We need to make sure the systems we already have in place are being followed. There isn't enough funding or staff.. that's the issue.. not that there isn't enough laws or enough supposed intervention.
It's just not happening as it should because social services have bee woefully underfunded

They don't even turn up when they say they will never mind rocking up to people's houses unannounced. And they can't force entry lol

This. Sara being taken out if school would have been a massive red flag and IF the existing rules and laws already in place had been followed the child would have been rescued. Not to mention all the neighbours who heard screaming on multiple occasions and did nothing.

It isnt just paying for it though, foster care is just one example, foster carers dont want to have children in their home who are going to set fire to it, hurt their own children or grandchildren, hurt their pets, damage their property, go missing so the carer has to be up all hours, smoking in the house, physically attacking the carers or making allegations that they have been hurt by the carers. They dont want to manage soiling or smearing.

Neither do residential care homes manage that, they give notice on children with these behaviours. They feel they cant manage it because of risk to other children in the property, their own staff, their ofsted registration if they're seen to not be managing or keeping the child and property safe.

Thats not necessarily relevant to the case we're talking about but its an example of the pressures on the system that isnt necessarily solved by money per se

If we know that children under 1 are most in danger, shouldn't we be focussing on them?

We should be focussing on children under 1 and all children that are at risk of being harmed. Before joining MN I never knew there was such destain for health visitors. I've found that on posts where people don't want to engage with one, the majority of people say don't, refuse their visits, they're not mandatory etc. but Hv perform a huge safeguarding role, and whilst not mandatory, I've never refused one, because I have nothing to hide and want to work with authorities in safeguarding children. A HV will not take your child away because you chose to sleep with them in your room or vice versa.

I voted YABU, but only because we should be doing both, not picking one over the other.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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..

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 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.