Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza said: “Today I’m thinking about all those who loved and cared about Sara. This review rightly recognises our collective outrage – and that it must never happen again.
“It is a catalogue of missed opportunities, poor communication and ill-informed assumptions, confirming what we always suspected: that the information needed to save Sara was available to the professionals tasked with her protection, but every part of the system lacked the curiosity to piece it together or ask tough questions, relying on the easy lies of her father and stepmother, at whose hands she died.
“Though nothing will bring Sara back or make up for the loss of her vibrant childhood, I welcome these recommendations. We already know what needs to happen: our fragmented children’s services need desperate reform, focused on prioritising resource, transformed information sharing and proper, professional accountability. But recommendations are nothing without action and implementation.
“I welcome measures already being introduced by the government in response, though they are long overdue. They must be given sufficient resource and priority else they too will fail. And we must go further: information sharing must never be the cause of a child losing their life. The reasonable chastisement defence withdrawn. And it must become impossible for children at risk of neglect or abuse to be removed from the protection of school under the guise of ‘home education’. The system is too easily manipulated by people with terrible intentions.
“Change is urgent – we are now more than two years on from Sara’s preventable murder and children are still dying.”
Additional information –
The Children’s Commissioner has made a series of demands in response to Sara Sharif’s death:
- Reiterating her call for a unique identifying number for every child to prevent them becoming invisible like Sara, and to make sure all the information about a child is accessible in one place;
- A register of children not in school and stricter rules around home education to prevent any child ever known to local authorities as being at risk of neglect or abuse from being removed from school;
- Setting national thresholds that trigger assessments to social care, removing the inconsistent practices that exist around the country, because a child’s safety must never be at the mercy of staff capacity or absence; and
- Removal of the legal defence of ‘reasonable chastisement’ in assault law to finally grant children equal protection from assault, so that no parent can ever believe, as Sara’s father claimed, that their abuse is justified.
