Opinion: Legal

New ministers can and must help stem rising complaints

Confusion and duplication in legal frameworks and guidance are making a difficult situation all the harder for schools

Confusion and duplication in legal frameworks and guidance are making a difficult situation all the harder for schools

10 Sep 2024, 5:00

A surge in parental complaints has been a key topic of discussion for schools in recent years. As its impact becomes increasingly evident, it’s crucial the new government moves swiftly to tackle this growing issue.

As discussed in Schools Week previously, Browne Jacobson’s latest School Leaders Survey  reveals a consistent increase in the number and complexity of complaints from parents, detrimentally impacting staff wellbeing and retention as well as quality of education.

Over half of respondents strongly agreed that parents and carers submitting complaints to multiple agencies while internal school procedures were ongoing (e.g. local authorities, MPs, Ofsted and the department for education) were creating additional burden. 

We can now add the Teacher Regulation Authority (TRA) to the list of recipients in this scatter-gun approach. Its new data shows teacher misconduct referrals have more than doubled in the past two years, from 714 in 2021/22 to 1,038 in 2022/23 and 1,684 in 2023/24. This, it notes, “has been largely driven by an increase in the number of referrals made by members of the public.”

To ease the burden on schools and the agencies involved, government must make changes to the legal and regulatory framework as well as the best practice guidance.

Regulatory changes

As Browne Jacobson first noted in the National Governance Association’s 2023 Taking stock of governance workload report, the disparity between the legal frameworks for maintained schools and academies is a potential cause for confusion.

Maintained schools are governed by the Education Act 2002. Meanwhile, academies are governed via their funding agreements by the Education (Independent School Standards) Regulations 2014.

The DfE’s best practice guidance for complaints procedures also carries different protocols in key areas. For example, a maintained school must establish procedures for dealing with complaints from anyone, such as parents, former parents and members of the community. The policy should have two stages: a formal stage and a second appeal stage heard by the governing board.

However, academies are only required to publish a complaints procedure to manage complaints from parents of existing pupils. On the other hand, the regulations are far more prescriptive on what an academy complaints procedure must contain.

Sir David Bell’s 2022 review of the ESFA recommended bringing the complaint functions for maintained schools and academies together in a fully centralised system within the DfE. This change has yet to be implemented.

Removing duplication

The DfE’s March 2023 Academies Regulatory and Commissioning Review identified “significant confusion and duplication around the process for parental complaints”.

Parents and carers reported being unclear about who was responsible for resolving various complaints, resulting in multiple agencies becoming involved.

As the number of complaints has risen, so too has the number of agencies who receive complaints simultaneously. This places additional burdens on schools as there may be scenarios in which they are dealing directly with a parent, but also the local authority, MP, Ofsted and TRA.

The DfE should support schools, parents and these agencies by providing clearer guidance on how and where complaints should be submitted to avoid duplication.

Further guidance on the difference between vexatious complaints and unreasonable parent behaviour (and the DfE’s expectations for appropriate handling of each) would also be welcome. 

Where complainants are deliberately adopting a scatter-gun approach and pursuing a strategy that prematurely involves external bodies, schools should be able to consider this as unreasonable and halt internal action until the external body decides who should proceed.

In the meantime…

Schools can play their part by signposting parents to appropriate stages of their internal complaints process and explaining the limitations of third-party agencies to intervene in parental complaints.

For example, a “qualifying complaint” for Ofsted would be something that raises an issue that affects the whole school; Ofsted does not have the power to investigate an individual complaint relating to a particular child.

Schools also need to ensure they are clear on the remit of third-party agencies and be ready to offer a commensurate response or, in some cases, appropriate challenge when a third-party agency is stepping outside the scope of its regulatory powers.

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