Home Schooling, Sara Sharif, and the Children’s Wellbeing Bill: A Critical Reflection

The tragic death of Sara Sharif has sent shockwaves across the UK, reigniting debates about how society can best protect its children. Amid this grief, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill promises to reshape education and child welfare systems. Yet, much of the discourse has shifted uncomfortably toward scapegoating home schooling, with suggestions that greater oversight of home-educated children could have prevented Sara’s murder.

This narrative is not only disingenuous but also distracts from the real systemic failures that contributed to Sara’s death. It overlooks why so many parents are opting out of the education system in the first place and how the Bill’s provisions risk deepening the challenges faced by families of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

Let’s critically examine how these threads connect and why the real focus should be on systemic reform, not scapegoating families.

Sara Sharif: A Tragedy of Systemic Failures

Sara Sharif’s death is a chilling reminder of the consequences of systemic breakdowns in safeguarding. Far from being hidden from authorities, Sara was known to child protection services before she was born. Agencies had multiple opportunities to intervene, yet somehow she was left in harm’s way.

To use her death as a springboard for targeting home schooling is misleading. Sara’s murder was not the result of home education but of inter-agency failures to act. The real questions we should be asking include:

• Why did existing safeguarding mechanisms fail to protect her?
• What prevented authorities from intervening earlier despite known risks?
• How can we improve child protection systems to ensure timely action in future cases?

These are the issues that demand our attention, not casting suspicion on parents who choose home education.

Why Are Parents Turning to Home Schooling?

The surge in home schooling is not a trend born of neglect or secrecy. It is a reaction to a failing education system that many parents believe no longer serves their children’s needs, especially for children with SEND.

Unmet SEND Needs

For many parents, the decision to home school is an act of protection. Mainstream schools often lack the resources, training, or flexibility to accommodate neurodiverse children. Instead of receiving tailored support, these children are frequently punished for behaviours stemming from their conditions.

Isolation booths, exclusions, and rigid behaviour policies leave parents with little choice but to withdraw their children to protect their mental health and wellbeing.

Punitive School Environments

Schools have increasingly adopted zero-tolerance policies and punitive discipline measures. Neurodiverse children, in particular, are disproportionately targeted. Every day, stories emerge of children being punished for their neurodiversity, unable to comply with rigid systems that ignore their unique needs. Instead of inclusion, they face exclusion, which often exacerbates trauma.

Mental Health Crisis

The UK is facing a child mental health crisis, and the education system is a key contributor. Bullying, academic pressure, and a lack of mental health resources in schools push children into anxiety and depression.

Parents home-school not to evade oversight but to provide an environment where their children feel safe, valued, and understood.

The Children’s Wellbeing Bill: A Step Forward or a Missed Opportunity?

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill introduces important measures to improve safeguarding, including multi-agency child protection teams and oversight of children not in school. However, its potential impact on home-schooling families and SEND children deserves closer scrutiny.

Improved Safeguarding

Provisions like multi-agency teams and enhanced information sharing aim to address systemic failures.

These are necessary reforms to ensure that children like Sara Sharif don’t slip through the cracks. But safeguarding alone is not enough if the underlying issues in education and social care remain unaddressed.

Targeting Home Schooling

The Bill mandates greater oversight of home-educated children, including compulsory registration and local authority consent for withdrawal from school. While safeguarding is paramount, these measures risk stigmatising home-schooling families as inherently suspect. For many, home schooling is not about avoiding scrutiny but about escaping a system that failed their children.

Neglecting SEND Needs

The Bill’s focus on education reform does little to address the systemic failures that drive parents to home school in the first place. Without substantial investment in SEND resources, teacher training, and mental health support, the cycle of unmet needs will continue, leaving more families feeling they have no choice but to opt out.

A Balanced Approach to Safeguarding

Safeguarding children is non-negotiable. Having "eyes" on vulnerable children is a societal responsibility, but this must be balanced with understanding why families make certain choices. To cast a blanket suspicion over home schooling risks alienating the very families trying to do their best for their children in a system that often works against them.

Instead, we must:

• Strengthen Child Protection Systems: Address resource gaps, improve inter-agency communication, and hold authorities accountable for timely interventions.
• Support SEND Families: Provide adequate funding, training, and inclusive policies in schools to meet the needs of all children.
• Reform School Cultures: Move away from punitive discipline toward trauma-informed, inclusive practices that support neurodiverse children.

Education and Mental Health: The Bigger Picture

The Children’s Wellbeing Bill cannot succeed without tackling the broader issues plaguing the education system. The soaring rates of child mental health problems demand that we ask hard questions about the role of schools in exacerbating these challenges.

If schools are to become places of learning and growth rather than sources of trauma, we need systemic change:

• Mental Health Integration: Embed mental health professionals in schools and make wellbeing as important as academic success.
• SEND Inclusion: Train teachers to recognize and support neurodiversity, and provide the resources to back it up.
• Accountability for Harm: Challenge and end practices like isolation booths and exclusions that harm children and drive families out of the system.

The Real Lesson from Sara Sharif

Sara Sharif’s death is a tragedy of systemic failure, not a failure of home schooling. Blaming her murder on the educational choices her family made ignores the deeper issues at play and risks alienating families already facing immense challenges.

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill has the potential to make a difference, but only if it addresses the root causes driving parents to home school and commits to genuine education reform. Safeguarding cannot come at the expense of support, and oversight cannot replace trust.

If we are serious about protecting children and honouring Sara’s memory, we must focus on fixing the systems that failed her, not scapegoating the families who have already been let down by them.

Summary of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill and Its Impact on SEND Families

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is a wide-ranging piece of legislation designed to improve child welfare, education, and safeguarding.

It includes measures addressing multi-agency cooperation, support for children in care, regulation of educational institutions, and enhanced oversight for children not attending school.

While the Bill has the potential to bring positive changes, it also raises concerns for families of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

Key Provisions of the Bill

Safeguarding and Child Welfare

• Introduces multi-agency child protection teams to improve collaboration between services like health, education, and social care.
• Mandates information sharing between agencies to prevent children from slipping through the cracks in safeguarding systems.

Support for Vulnerable Groups

• Requires local authorities to provide a “kinship local offer,” including information on financial and practical support for kinship carers.
• Expands responsibilities to promote educational achievement for children in care, including those in kinship care.

School Attendance and Home Education

• Requires compulsory registration for children not in school, including home-schooled children.
• Local authority consent is required before withdrawing a child from school in certain cases, with stricter monitoring of educational outcomes for home-educated children.

Educational and Welfare Reforms

• Provides free breakfast clubs in primary schools to address barriers to attendance and learning.
• Strengthens regulations on teacher misconduct, qualifications, and inspections.
• Ensures academies comply with the National Curriculum and provides new powers for local authorities to manage school admissions.

Regulation of Care Providers

• Introduces limits on profits for private care providers, aiming to ensure public funds are used effectively.
• Strengthens oversight of children’s homes and fostering agencies.

Impact on SEND Families

• Enhanced Safeguarding and Support

Potential Benefits:

• Multi-agency collaboration could address longstanding issues where services fail to communicate about children with SEND, leading to better-targeted interventions.
• The promotion of educational achievement for children in care includes a focus on removing barriers to learning, which may benefit SEND children in foster or kinship care.

Concerns:

Families worry that increased data sharing could result in breaches of privacy or overly bureaucratic scrutiny, particularly if SEND needs are misinterpreted as safeguarding risks.

• Changes to Home Education Oversight

Potential Benefits:

Safeguarding measures, like registration and oversight, aim to ensure that home-educated children with SEND receive a quality education.

Concerns:

Families home-schooling children with SEND often do so because of unmet needs, punitive school environments, or to protect their child’s mental health. These provisions risk stigmatising home education as inherently problematic and could place additional burdens on parents already navigating complex systems.

• School Reforms and SEND Needs

Potential Benefits:

• Provisions like free breakfast clubs and mandatory compliance with the National Curriculum in academies could help improve inclusivity and learning outcomes for SEND children.
• Enhanced teacher training and misconduct regulations may reduce harmful practices disproportionately affecting neurodiverse children.

Concerns:

The Bill does little to address systemic failures in mainstream education for SEND children, such as inadequate resources, lack of specialist staff, and punitive discipline practices. These failures are a primary reason many families feel forced to leave the system.

• Accountability for Local Authorities

Potential Benefits:

The requirement for local authorities to provide detailed support offers for care leavers and children in kinship care could improve access to services for SEND families.

Concerns:

Local authorities may struggle to meet these obligations due to funding constraints, leaving families with promises but no practical support.

Conclusion

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill aims to strengthen safeguards and improve child welfare, but its impact on SEND families will depend on how it is implemented.

While enhanced protections and support are welcome, families of SEND children remain concerned about the lack of systemic reform in mainstream education and the potential stigmatisation of home-schooling parents.

To truly support SEND families, the Bill must be accompanied by robust funding, inclusive practices, and meaningful engagement with those directly affected.

To read the full Bill - click here