‘We need to act’: Education Secretary on child safeguarding

As a result of what happened to Sara Sharif, the government published new safeguarding measures in its Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.

So what are they proposing?

Parents will no longer have an automatic right to educate their children at home if their child is under a child protection plan or the subject of an investigation.

Local authorities will have a new power to require any child to attend school if their home is deemed to be unsuitable or unsafe.

New registers will be established to identify children who aren’t in school and all children will be given a unique identifier number – similar to National Insurance numbers for adults – to link records across services.

This is what campaigners have been calling for, but they’ve also been asking for a UK wide ban on smacking which is already in place in Scotland and Wales.

Those are points we put to the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson.

Bridget Phillipson: It’s clear to me that the time for words, for talk of lessons learned, is over. We need to act. There have been, sadly, too many cases where children have been failed by the state. And that’s why what I’m setting out today before parliament is a landmark piece of legislation that will keep children safe and will make sure that all of us work together to give children the best start in life.

Ayshah Tull: Are you asking the chancellor for more resources on this? Because that all sounds very well and good, but if you don’t have the social workers in place, you don’t have community paediatricians, you don’t have police officers looking out for these children, again, these are just empty words.

Bridget Phillipson: I recognise the enormity of the scale in terms of what we’ve inherited. We know that our public services have been under enormous pressure over the last decade. That’s why through the budget there was a record level of investment going into local councils with a ring fenced dedicated children’s prevention support grant as part of that, to do a lot more to support children and families at the earliest possible point.

Ayshah Tull: You know that councils are on their knees. There were figures bandied around all the time, £4 billion deficit, there’s no way that they can afford to do this and afford to keep children safe in the way that you’re suggesting.

Bridget Phillipson: They can’t afford not to do it, because what we’re seeing at the moment is the price of failure. Billions of pounds being spent on a system that is delivering terrible outcomes for children, the ever escalating cost of private placements. My primary focus is on better outcomes for children, but this will also bring down costs to councils. We can’t continue with this trajectory of spend. It’s ever spiralling and it’s pushing councils to the brink.

Ayshah Tull: Why don’t you include a smacking ban in this to really protect children? Can your hand on your heart say that this is the best legislation that you can offer right now.

Bridget Phillipson: This is a significant piece of legislation, a seminal moment in how we keep children safe. There have been far too many examples where the state has failed children, and often across those cases you see a range of very similar factors that will often involve domestic violence. And there’s a lot more we have to do as a country to tackle domestic violence. It will often involve a failure to share information between different agencies involved in children’s lives. What’s impossible to eliminate is the fact that there will sometimes be dangerous, manipulative individuals who will seek to inflict serious harm on those children that they are responsible for. We can’t stop that. But what we can do is intervene much more quickly to take action to protect children.

Ayshah Tull: But then why not have a smacking ban?

Bridget Phillipson: We’re not intending to legislate around smacking, and the cases that you have just described are incredibly serious and are about far more than smacking.

Ayshah Tull: So smacking isn’t serious?

Bridget Phillipson: The cases that we’re talking about are where there has been a serious, sustained pattern of violence and abuse that has often resulted in the death of a child. I do understand the calls from others to look closely at this. We will keep it under review. I want to look at the approach that has been taken in Wales and the impact that has had. But I think there is a distinction to draw between what people call smacking and extremely serious cases where children have been subjected to unspeakable violence.