A senior judge who jailed the killers of Sara Sharif has said the 10-year-old’s murder “starkly illustrates the dangers” of parents automatically being able to homeschool their children.
Sara had twice been pulled out of school by her father, Urfan Sharif, and stepmother, Beinash Batool, as a “ruse adopted for wholly selfish purposes” to cover up evidence of her repeated beatings.
The judge, Mr Justice Cavanagh, said homeschooling had allowed the couple to continue abusing Sara “beyond the gaze of the authorities”.
The eight-week trial heard that Batool would put makeup on Sara’s bruises to conceal them from her teachers and that the schoolgirl was eventually dressed in a hijab.
Sara’s teachers did notice bruises on her face and referred her to social services just months before she was killed. In April 2023, a month after social services closed the case, Sharif informed Sara’s headteacher for the second time that he would be homeschooling his daughter with immediate effect.
She was found dead in a bunk bed at the family home in Surrey on 10 August 2023. Sharif, 43, and Batool, 30, were jailed for life for her murder on Tuesday as ministers introduced a new bill to tighten up homeschooling in England.
The children’s wellbeing and schools bill will enable the government to introduce registers to identify and keep track of children not in school, while parents seeking to educate their child at home will face greater scrutiny.
Under the new legislation, parents will no longer have an automatic right to educate their children at home if their child is subject to a child protection investigation or under a child protection plan.
If a child’s home environment is judged to be unsuitable or unsafe, councils will also have new powers to intervene in homeschooling arrangements and require school attendance for any child.
Cavanagh said Sara’s murder had raised questions about whether more could have been done to prevent her death. Sharif was given custody of Sara in October 2019 despite being accused of abusing her siblings and mother for years.
During his sentencing remarks at the Old Bailey, the judge said: “The fact that Sara’s school had raised safeguarding concerns, and the fact that Urfan Sharif was previously on the radar of various authorities as an alleged perpetrator of domestic abuse, inevitably raise questions about whether more could have been done to prevent the tragic consequences in this case.”
He said it was not his role to express an opinion on the matter, but added: “This case brings into sharp relief the dangers of unsupervised homeschooling of vulnerable children. When they felt they needed to, you, Urfan Sharif and Beinash Batool, were able to hide the abuse that Sara was suffering by the simple expedient of announcing that she was to be homeschooled.
“Of course, there are many cases in which parents take their children out of school for periods of homeschooling for good reasons and with the best of intentions, but this case starkly illustrates the dangers. It is a matter of concern that parents who are abusing or who have malign intent towards their children appear to be able to homeschool more or less at will and without supervision.”
Cavanagh said Sharif had made sudden decisions to homeschool Sara on June 2022 and April 2023. “On each occasion, this was because the visible signs of the beatings that you had carried out had become so obvious that you were worried that the authorities would find out how you were treating her,” he told Sharif.
“The pretext of homeschooling was simply a ruse adopted for wholly selfish purposes, to cover up the abuse to which Sara was subject, and to continue with the abuse beyond the gaze of the authorities. At the time when Sara was being subjected to despicable abuse, she was also being deprived of an education.”
He said Batool had “connived” in the use of the hijab, dark glasses, makeup and homeschooling to conceal the injuries suffered by Sara.
After sentencing, the NSPCC called for “substantial, nationwide reform and investment in the services which we rely on to keep our children safe”. The children’s commissioner is among those calling for an end to the legal defence of “reasonable chastisement” in England set out in the Children’s Act of 2004.
