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Khyra Ishaq: Five Months at Home (Case File)

On the morning of 17 May 2008, an ambulance was called to a house in Handsworth, Birmingham. Paramedics found seven-year-old Khyra Ishaq dead. She weighed thirty-seven pounds, and the Court of Appeal later noted that the house held an abundance of good, wholesome food. Five months earlier she had been a pupil with a perfect attendance record. In December 2007 her school reported that she had been taking food. That same month her mother wrote to say she would educate her at home.

This is the case file on Khyra Ishaq. I follow how the one institution that saw her every day dropped out of her life, and how a school's concern about food went into a referral that was inaccurately recorded and then lost. I also cover the serious case review, the first in England to be published in full. It found that some agencies lost sight of the child, and that home education law gave local authorities no power to monitor or inspect. I cover the two prosecutions and sentences, the 2011 Court of Appeal judgment, and Angela Gordon's release in 2017. I say plainly where the record runs out, including the outcome of the social workers' disciplinary and regulatory processes.

I also draw on more than fourteen years of social work practice to look at six areas, and end with questions for professionals.

Chapters (approximate):

• Cold open: the 999 call
• The family before Junaid Abuhamza
• December 2007: the food, the letter, the school gap
• Home education and the doorstep problem
• The serious case review
• What happened to the professionals
• The trials, the pleas and the sentences
• The Court of Appeal and release
• Six strands for professionals
• Questions to take back to your practice

Content note: The episode discusses the starvation and death of a child. The script deliberately avoids a detailed account of what the children went through, in line with the court's own approach.