Guidance

School complaints procedures: guidance for maintained schools

How local authority-maintained schools and maintained nurseries can set up or review their complaints procedures.

• From: Department for Education
• Published: 6 January 2016
• Last updated: 15 January 2021
  Show all updates

  1. 15 January 2021

     Updated 'Handling complaints during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak' section in 'Best practice guidance for school complaints procedures 2020'.

  2. 15 September 2020

     Updated 'Handling complaints during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak' section.

  3. 15 June 2020

     Added links to separate guidance covering complaints procedures for academies and independent schools.

  4. 9 April 2020

     Added information to the best practice guidance about handling complaints during the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak.

  5. 28 March 2019

     Added new information on the use of independent governors and duplicate complaints.

  6. 11 January 2019

     Replaced best practice advice with an updated version for 2019.

  7. 6 January 2016

     First published.

Applies to England

Documents

Best practice guidance for school complaints procedures 2020

HTML

Model complaints procedure

ODT, 35.4 KB

This file is in an OpenDocument format

Model policy for managing serial and unreasonable complaints

ODT, 15 KB

This file is in an OpenDocument format

Details

This guidance is for:

• local authority-maintained schools
• community, foundation or voluntary schools
• community or foundation special schools
• nursery schools which are maintained by a local authority and are not special schools

There’s separate guidance for parents and the wider community at How to complain about a school.

Do not follow this guidance if you are:

• an academy – there’s separate guidance on Setting up an academies complaints procedure
• an independent school – there’s separate information about Regulating independent schools
• a private nursery school
• a free school
• a further education or other post-16 institutions that is not attached to a maintained school

DfE acknowledges the contribution of members of the Advisory Group on Governance, ACE Education and also Hampshire, Surrey, West Sussex and Dorset local authorities in the production of these documents. Some of the content is reproduced, by kind permission, from their model complaints procedures.