The law must change so children who are suspected victims of abuse cannot be home educated, the Children’s Commissioner said as she called for urgent action following Sara Sharif’s brutal murder.
Dame Rachel de Souza told BBC Newsnight it was “madness” that children who were at risk of abuse at home should be taken out of school, which should act as a “safeguard”.
She called for actions at a systemic level, including a unique identifier for every child and “proper data sharing” between councils and schools.
On Wednesday, Sara’s father Urfan Sharif, 42, and stepmother Beinash Batool, 30, were found guilty of her murder. Her uncle Faisal Malik, 29, who lived with them, was convicted of causing or allowing her death.
Sara, 10, was beaten to death four years after taxi driver Sharif was awarded custody, despite accusations of abuse against him, jurors heard.
Prosecutor William Emlyn Jones KC said Sharif created a “culture of violent discipline”, where assaults on Sara had “become completely routine, completely normalised”.
In January 2023, Sara had begun wearing a hijab to cover up the bruises at school.
Teachers noticed marks on her face and referred her to social services in March of that year, but the case was dropped within days.
The following month, Sara was taken out of school and the violence against her intensified in the weeks before her death.
Dame Rachel repeated a call for a home education register, which is to be included in the Government’s proposed Children’s Wellbeing Bill, in order to have “proper oversight” of children out of school.
And she said councils should be given powers to sign off on home education requests for vulnerable children.
She told the programme: “In that Children’s Wellbeing Bill, it must say that if a child is suspected of abuse, they cannot be educated at home. Being in school is a safeguard, and actually they are safer under the eyes of teachers.
“We cannot let a child who is at risk, you know, from the very people who are meant to care for her at home, go be educated at home. It’s madness.”
And Dame Rachel said it “turned my blood cold” after Urfan Sharif said “I’ve legally punished my daughter and she’s dead” in a phone call to police. She called for a clause in assault laws to be changed which allows for reasonable chastisement of children.
She raised Victoria Climbie’s death in 2000 and said it was “so remarkably similar to Sara’s”, adding “we need now to draw the line, never again, and the way to get never again is through action”.
Dame Rachel said there needed to be better data sharing between authorities so children did not “fall off their radar”.
She said: “We should not be in a situation in this country that we are in, that social care areas don’t have the data or share the data between health and education.”
David Fawcett, the great-grandfather of 16-month-old Star Hobson, who was murdered by her mother’s former partner Savannah Brockhill in 2020, told BBC Newsnight when he heard the news of Sara’s death he thought “is this going to keep on happening?”.
He said: “We thought, well, you know, when it happened with Star, social services and all this, something would get sorted out, you won’t hear of these things happening as much, but it just seems to keep on happening.
“I mean, there’s been several murders since we lost Star, when this one came up, I thought it’s children again. Just seems to be children that suffer.”
Rachael Wardell, from Surrey County Council, said that until an independent safeguarding review has concluded, a “complete picture cannot be understood or commented upon”.
The Police and Crime Commissioner for Surrey, Lisa Townsend, welcomed the review, saying: “It is clear in this case that calculated attempts were made to ensure the sustained abuse of Sara happened out of plain sight.
“But there are undoubtedly questions that need answering on what could have been done to prevent her death.”
The court heard how the defendants had fled to Pakistan after Sara died at the family home in Woking, Surrey, on August 8 2023.
Sharif called police when he arrived in Islamabad and confessed he had beaten her up “too much”.
Officers went to his former home and found Sara’s broken and battered body in a bunk bed, with a confession note from Sharif on the pillow.
Sara had suffered more than 25 broken bones, from being hit repeatedly with a cricket bat, metal pole and mobile phone.
She had a broken hyoid bone in her neck from being throttled, iron burns on her buttocks, boiling water burns on her feet and human bite marks on her arm and thigh.
There was also evidence she had been bound with packaging tape and hooded during the assaults, which would have left her in excruciating pain, jurors heard.
On August 8, Sara collapsed and Batool reacted by summoning Sharif home and calling her family 30 times.
Sharif’s reaction to finding his daughter lying close to death in Batool’s lap was to “whack” her in the stomach twice with a pole for “pretending”, jurors heard.
Within hours of Sara’s death, the couple were arranging flights to Pakistan for the next day for themselves and the rest of the family.
The defendants returned to the UK on September 13 2023 – leaving behind other children who had travelled with them – and were detained within minutes of a flight touching down at Gatwick airport.
After the verdicts were returned at the Old Bailey, Sara’s mother, Olga Sharif, paid tribute to her, saying: “Sara had beautiful, brown eyes and an angelic voice. Sara’s smile could brighten up the darkest room.”
Mr Justice Cavanagh adjourned sentencing until next Tuesday.