Handling Parent Complaints When You Have No Headteacher

A practical guide for proprietors, boards and trustees

Complaints don’t pause during a leadership gap. If anything they increase, because families notice instability and because the person who usually resolved things informally has gone.

Many proprietors tell us the complaints were what tipped a manageable vacancy into a difficult term. Each one individually was answerable. Together, with nobody obvious to handle them, they consumed the leadership capacity the school didn’t have.

What do the standards require?

Registered independent schools must have a complaints procedure that meets the requirements set out in the Independent School Standards, and it has to be followed as written.

That usually means three stages: informal resolution, formal written complaint investigated by the school, and a panel hearing. The panel stage is the one that causes difficulty during a vacancy, because it must include a member independent of the management and running of the school.

Two points follow. Your procedure is a published document and parents will hold you to it, including the timescales. And a vacancy is not a reason to depart from it, however inconvenient the arrangements become.

If your procedure names the headteacher at a particular stage, and you don’t have one, you need to work out now who performs that function rather than when a complaint arrives.

The first thing to do

Read your own complaints procedure and map it against who’s currently in post.

Where does it name the headteacher? Is your procedure itself current? Who investigates a formal complaint? Who chairs or convenes the panel? Who does a parent escalate to if they’re unhappy with the first response?

Then write down who performs each function during the vacancy, and tell your staff and your families. A parent who’s told clearly who to contact is far less likely to escalate than one who’s passed between three people.

Do this in the first week of the vacancy. Doing it when the first complaint arrives means making the arrangement under pressure and looking as though you’re improvising.

The independence problem

This is where vacancies cause real difficulty.

The panel stage requires a member independent of the management and running of the school. In a small independent setting that’s frequently difficult at the best of times, and it gets harder when the proprietor is also covering leadership functions.

The problem is compounded if the proprietor has already been involved at an earlier stage. Someone who investigated the formal complaint cannot then sit on the panel considering it.

Practically, identify your independent member now rather than when a panel is needed. It should be someone with no connection to the running of the school, not a friend of the proprietor and not a former member of staff. Where you can’t find someone suitable internally, commission an independent person for the role.

Where the interim leader has been in post only a few weeks, they may be a genuinely appropriate person to investigate a complaint about events they weren’t here for, which is one of the practical advantages of an external appointment.

Complaints that arrive because of the vacancy

A distinct category and worth recognising.

Some complaints during a leadership gap are really about the gap: a parent who feels unheard because their usual contact has gone, a family worried about stability, or an issue that would previously have been resolved in a corridor conversation.

These frequently resolve at the informal stage if someone senior calls the parent promptly and listens properly. What turns them into formal complaints is delay, or being passed between people, or a sense that nobody is in charge.

In a specialist setting this matters more than elsewhere. Families have often fought for the placement and are more anxious about change than parents in mainstream schools. Ten minutes on the phone early prevents a great deal.

Complaints about the departed headteacher

These arrive, and they need handling properly rather than being treated as historic.

The complaint is about the school, not the individual, so it doesn’t lapse because they’ve left. Investigate it as you would any other, and be careful about what you say regarding a former employee.

Where the complaint concerns safeguarding or the conduct of an adult towards a child, that goes to your local authority designated officer regardless of whether the person still works for you. Take advice before doing anything else.

Where the departure was itself connected to the matter complained about, take legal advice on what can and can’t be said. This is a situation where an honest, careful response protects everyone and an improvised one doesn’t.

Timescales

Your published procedure sets them and a vacancy is not a reason to miss them.

Where you genuinely cannot meet a timescale, tell the parent before it expires, say why, and give a new date. That’s far better than silence, and it’s the difference between a family who feels informed and one who escalates.

Missed timescales are also the thing most likely to turn a complaint about something small into a complaint about how the school handles complaints, which is much harder to resolve and shows up in an inspection.

From our experience

The pattern we see most often is a school that handled each complaint reasonably and never looked at them together.

Six complaints in a term, each answered individually, is a signal about something. Frequently it’s communication rather than provision, and it’s fixable once someone notices. A monthly look at the log takes ten minutes and prevents the seventh.

Many proprietors tell us the independent panel member was the thing that caught them out. A complaint reached panel stage, nobody suitable was available, and the timescale slipped while they looked. Identifying that person in advance costs one conversation.

We also see complaints handled by whoever was available rather than by whoever the procedure named, which creates a fairness problem later if the parent challenges the process.

A common misconception

“We can deal with complaints less formally while we’re between headteachers.”

It’s an understandable instinct when a board is stretched, and it’s the one that causes the most damage.

Your complaints procedure is a published document that forms part of your compliance position. Departing from it during a vacancy gives a dissatisfied parent an entirely legitimate second complaint, this time about your process, and that one is much harder to answer.

It also matters for the children. A complaints procedure that works is how families raise concerns about their child’s provision, and in a specialist setting those concerns are frequently about whether provision matches their child’s plan. A school that handles complaints loosely during a difficult term is a school that stops hearing what parents are telling it.

Questions for proprietors and boards

• Have we mapped our complaints procedure against who is actually in post?
• Do families know who to contact during the vacancy?
• Have we identified an independent panel member in advance?
• Are we meeting our published timescales, and telling parents when we can’t?
• Has anyone looked at the complaints log as a whole this term?

Our perspective

Complaints during a leadership gap are manageable and they’re rarely managed, because nobody decided in advance who does what.

Map the procedure against who’s in post in week one. Tell families who to contact. Find your independent panel member before you need one. Call parents early, because most complaints resolve informally when someone listens promptly. Keep to your timescales. And look at the pattern monthly.

That takes an hour of preparation and it protects both your compliance position and, more importantly, the channel through which families tell you what their children need while the adults are busy with something else.