Written statement on Safeguarding - Nov 13

Secretary of State for Education (Bridget Phillipson): The whole country remembers with profound sadness the tragic murder of Sara Sharif by her father and stepmother in August 2023. Aged just 10 years old, the unimaginable cruelty of Sara's death at the hands of those who should have been her first and brightest source of love and care shocked us all.

Justice has been served, and Sara's father and stepmother are now serving life sentences. But as a society our response to this appalling case cannot end there. Just as we were a nation united in our grief for that precious little girl, now we must be united in our resolve to do whatever possible to prevent this from happening again.

Child protection professionals work tirelessly to improve the lives of vulnerable children across the country, often under challenging circumstances. I know they will have been just as horrified as the rest of us by what happened to Sara. But as a child protection system – and as a wider society – we must be brave enough to look ourselves in the eye and be open and honest about what went wrong. As the Prime Minister has said, questions must be answered.

Today's publication of the Local Child Safeguarding Practice Review into the case by the Surrey Safeguarding Children Partnership is part of that vital process. The Review provides an independent reflection on the changes required to protect children like Sara. Across all agencies concerned, it highlights mistakes that were made and opportunities that were missed.

I want to assure the House that this government is treating the findings of the Review with the strongest possible seriousness. We are already acting to close gaps, to strengthen safeguarding and to keep children safe. The first steps are set out in the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which will sharply improve the clarity of information sharing and help make sure that children not in school (including those in Elective Home Education) are safe.

The introduction of compulsory Children Not in School registers will empower local authorities to better identify children who need support and protection, as will the accompanying duties on parents of eligible children and out-of-school education providers. The measures will ensure that the most vulnerable children cannot be withdrawn from school until it is confirmed that doing so would be in their best interests. Local authorities will have to assess the home learning environment when determining whether an electively home educated child's education is suitable or whether it is in the best interests of the most vulnerable children. Where it is not, local authorities will have the power to require these children to attend school.

Local support services matter too. By building on the evidence from programmes like Supporting Families, and more than doubling investment in prevention services, we are giving families and children access to the better services they need in their communities. That's how we'll break the cycle of late intervention and help more children and families to stay safely together. The Families First Partnership programme, which started in April this year, will drive the national rollout of Family Help, multi-agency child protection and family group decision making reforms contained in the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill. The Bill also includes a new duty for safeguarding partners to create the multi-agency teams in every area. They will bring experts together across social work, police, health and education to identify actual or likely significant harm and take decisive action to protect children. And new Family Help services will mean a single offer of support, delivered by the right people at the right time, reducing the need for multiple handovers between different professionals and unnecessary assessments for families and children.

Coordination is key. The Review highlights that agencies and practitioners failed to ‘join the dots' to recognise the dangers faced by Sara once she moved in with her father and stepmother. We want agencies and practitioners to spend less time chasing information and more time acting on the full picture about a child. A new duty in the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill clarifies that practitioners must share relevant information where it relates to safeguarding or promoting a child's welfare. It applies even without parental consent, allows practitioners to request information and covers information about other people around the child. We are also improving case management systems, developing consistent data and introducing a single unique identifier to improve data linking and stop children falling through the cracks of services.

Tackling domestic abuse and violence against women and girls is a priority for this Government. We will improve how courts respond to allegations of domestic abuse within private law children proceedings, including through the introduction of the Pathfinder pilot courts, now operational in nine areas. We'll put the child's voice at the heart, adopting a multi-agency approach to boost coordination and improve the family court experience for all parties.

We'll tackle the causes of abuse too, growing the roots of a safer society for all. That's why we have updated the RSHE curriculum to support positive relationships and help children to recognise abusive behaviour from an early age. And we know that to protect women, girls and all our children, we must back our workforces. We're upskilling social workers, investing in national graduate training routes, introducing a new 2-year early career training programme for all new children's social workers, and rolling out new training on advanced child protection. This includes new Post Qualifying Standards (PQS) to help improve the quality of practice and retention. Domestic abuse, including coercive and controlling behaviour, will feature prominently in the new programme that flows from the PQS.

We are also working with Foundations to generate evidence on what works to prevent domestic abuse and support families. The evidence will target how to consistently measure outcomes across different interventions, and how to support the recovery of babies, children and young people. Looking to the future, the cross government VAWG Strategy is due to be published shortly. The strategy will set out how we will halve VAWG in a decade – as well as the further measures we will take to support the victims and tackle the perpetrators.

These are the first steps we as a government are taking. But we know we must go further – as this review of Sara's case makes plain. We will consider the findings with all the care and consideration they deserve, and we will continue to strengthen the way we protect children in this country. But keeping children safe is a duty that spreads right across society. So, I hope that in the wake of this terrible loss, we will all come together and live up to our shared responsibility.

While the shocking brutality of her murder is impossible to forget, we must do our best not to remember Sara only in that context of cruelty. She deserves to be known for who she was, not just for what she suffered through. Sara was a 10-year-old girl full of personality, blessed with a lovely smile and a loud laugh. She liked to sing and dance. She loved her siblings. It is those precious memories of Sara that must now strengthen our resolve to give every child the full and happy life that she was so tragically denied.