The National Governance Association refreshed two pieces of complaints guidance on 12 August. Its complaints procedures guide and its managing complaints guide were both updated on the same day, a fortnight before most boards meet for the first time this academic year. That is a quiet signal about what the autumn term is likely to involve.
It follows the joint guidance the Department for Education published with Parentkind and Ofsted in January, supported by thirteen education bodies including the National Education Union, the Association of School and College Leaders and the Local Government Association. Most of the coverage at the time treated it as a school leadership story. Read the fifth step properly and it is a governance story.
Step five lands on your desk
The guidance sets out five steps for parents. Decide whether you have feedback, a concern or a formal complaint. Work out who to approach. Go to the person closest to your child first. Keep a record and check the school's timescales. And then, if the school's response has not settled it, escalate.
Escalate to whom? The governing board or the trustees. That is step five, in black and white, in a document the DfE, Ofsted and thirteen sector bodies have put their names to and that has now been in parents' hands since January.
The DfE's own recommendation for maintained schools is a two stage procedure, with the headteacher handling stage one and the board hearing the appeal at stage two, through a panel of three governors who have had no prior involvement with the complaint. Most boards know this. Most boards have a complaints panel written into their terms of reference and a clerk who can convene one at short notice.
So boards are ready for step five. What worries me is how few are ready for the thing that produces step five in the first place.
A complaints panel is a board defending a decision. The cheaper work is making decisions that do not need defending.
The number worth putting in front of your board
Parentkind polled 2,000 parents ahead of the guidance. One in four said there had been a breakdown of trust between schools and parents at their child's school. Not a disagreement about a uniform policy. A breakdown of trust.
Alongside that, polling by the NAHT found that more than four in five school leaders had experienced abuse from parents. Schools Week has separately reported headteachers describing a surge in AI generated complaints, which is why the guidance now tells parents to use AI "with caution" because it "doesn't always get it right when citing laws and can make a complaint more complex than necessary".
Those three findings describe the same problem from different angles. A quarter of parents feel unheard. When people feel unheard, they escalate. And escalation is now easier, faster and better armed than it has ever been.
Your board cannot fix parental anxiety. It can fix the part it owns, which is whether a parent can see that a decision was taken properly.
Most complaints are a decision that was never explained
I have sat with enough school business managers to notice a pattern. The complaints that go to panel are rarely about a decision that was wrong. They are about a decision that arrived without warning, from a body the parent has never met, with no visible reasoning behind it.
Uniform suppliers change. Term dates shift. A catering contract moves. The board discussed it properly, weighed it properly and minuted it properly. But the parent's first contact with the decision was a letter in a book bag, and the letter did not say who decided, on what evidence, or who was asked.
That gap is where complaints are born. It is also entirely within the board's control.
The guidance asks schools to be open, transparent, personal and accessible, and to make complaints policies easy to find rather than buried on a website. That is good advice. I would add one thing to it. Being accessible after a decision matters far less than being accessible before one.
If a parent can point to the moment they were asked, they are far less likely to spend the autumn asking why they were not.
What to put in the September agenda
Four things, none of which need a budget line.
- Check your parent governor seats are actually filled. A board that is short of parent representation is a board that will be asked, at panel, how it understood the parent view. Maintained schools must run an election for a parent governor vacancy. There are no statutory rules about how, beyond it being fair and accessible to every parent, which gives you a lot of freedom and no excuse.
- Review the complaints procedure against the new guidance. Not the panel mechanics, which are probably fine. The findability. Can a parent locate it in two clicks from your homepage, and does it use plain English about what happens and when.
- Pick one decision this term and consult on it properly. Not a survey nobody sees the results of. A real question, put to every parent, with the outcome published and the reasoning attached. One is enough to change how a board is perceived.
- Keep the evidence. Who was asked, when, how many responded, what they said, what the board decided as a result. That record is worth more at a complaints panel than any amount of procedural correctness.
The point of all this
The Education Secretary said the January guidance was intended to "reset the relationship" between parents and schools. A reset is not something a complaints procedure can deliver. Procedures handle the relationship once it has already gone wrong.
What resets a relationship is a parent being asked something and seeing the answer count. That happens upstream of the complaints process, in the ordinary business of consulting people before decisions are made, and it happens through the governing board more than anywhere else in the school.
Boards that get this right will have quieter panels this year. Not because parents stopped caring, but because they were brought in earlier.
If you want to make asking parents easier this term, whether that is a parent governor election you have been putting off or a straightforward consultation on a decision that affects families, have a look at what we do at choicevoting.co.uk. Setting one up takes about five minutes, and every response is recorded and auditable, which is exactly what you want in front of you if a decision is ever questioned.