I want to complain!

The autumn term is a good time to check your schools complaints procedures.

All schools and trusts should have procedures to deal with all complaints relating to their school and to any community facilities or services that the school provides, for which there are no separate (statutory) procedures.

The duty to establish procedures for dealing with complaints lies with the governing body or trust, often delegated to a committee and model policies will need to be tailored to each individual school.

The Department for education have published non-statutory model policies for maintained schools and guidance for setting up an academy complaints procedure.

Schools are recommended to incorporate a serial complaints policy to deal with serial and unreasonable complaints into their complaints procedure, see serial complaints policy for further information.

Complaints that are not solved at school level often escalate to Ofsted. Last academic year Ofsted received 14,900 complaints about schools, almost a 25 per cent increase on the previous year. Prior to the pandemic, they received around 10,300 complaints in 2019/20 and around 12,200 in 2018/19.

Schools Week recently noted that schools are reporting a wider post-pandemic rise in parental grievances themselves. With one trust estimating the volume of complaints from parents last academic year to be two or three times 2019 levels.

A chief executive is reported as telling Schools Week that while parents used to “go up to a teacher to complain…Now they skip that stage and go direct to thermo-nuclear war, an email to Ofsted, copy in the MP, for things that wouldn’t have met the threshold before”.

If you would you like more information about what parents really expect from schools, have a look at the latest Edurio report just published ‘What do parents and carers expect from schools?’