Investigations in PRUs and Alternative Provision

A practical guide for PRU headteachers, AP directors, management committees and trust boards

Investigations in alternative provision have a feature no other setting shares. The young person usually belongs to somebody else as well.

They’re on a school’s roll, or placed by a local authority, or directed off site by a trust. When something goes wrong, the investigation isn’t an internal matter. It’s a conversation between organisations, each with its own duties, and often with different views about what happened and who should be looking at it.

Many AP leaders tell us the hardest part wasn’t the incident. It was three days of nobody being certain whose job it was to investigate, while a parent waited and a commissioner started asking questions.

In this guide we’ll cover who investigates in each kind of AP, how shared responsibility actually works, the practical problems of multi site working, and what commissioners will want from you. The process itself is covered in our guide to school investigations.

Who Investigates in a PRU or Alternative Provision?

It depends what you are, and the differences are real.

A PRU is maintained by the local authority and has a management committee. Complaints and staff matters follow the authority’s frameworks, with the management committee performing the governing body function.

An AP academy or free school sits within a trust. The trust board and its central team hold the governance and HR functions, and complaints escalate through the trust and then beyond it.

A registered independent school providing AP follows the complaints requirements in the Independent School Standards, including the panel stage with an independent member.

An unregistered AP provider has directors and, frequently, nothing else. No governing body, no external structure, and no obvious route for a concern about the leadership. This is where the independence problem is sharpest, and where a serious complaint most often exposes it.

Whichever you are, settle one question now rather than later: who would investigate a concern about your most senior person? We cover the test in when to commission an independent investigation in a school.

Who Is Responsible When a Pupil Is Placed With You?

Both of you, and that’s the point people find confusing.

A young person placed with you remains the responsibility of the referring school or authority. Placing a pupil in alternative provision doesn’t transfer that duty. So when something happens, several questions arrive at once. Who investigates? Whose complaints procedure applies? Who tells the parents? Who tells the local authority designated officer?

The practical answers are usually these.

Safeguarding referrals are made by whoever holds the concern, immediately, and are never delayed while ownership is worked out. Where an allegation concerns a member of your staff, you refer to the designated officer for the authority where your provision is located. The sequence is set out in the LADO process explained.

Complaints about your provision follow your procedure, even where the parent raised it with the referring school first.

Complaints about the placement decision belong to the referrer, not to you, and should be redirected clearly rather than absorbed.

Both organisations should be told about anything serious, promptly, and the referrer should hear it from you rather than from a parent.

Agree all of this in the placement agreement rather than working it out during an incident. Most placement agreements are silent on it, and that silence costs days at exactly the moment you don’t have them.

How Does Multi Site Working Affect an Investigation?

It makes everything harder, and in a way that’s easy to miss until you’re halfway through.

Concerns logged at one site may never reach the person who could see the pattern. Records sit in different systems. Site leads make judgement calls alone because nobody senior is present. Witnesses are spread across locations and shifts, some of them part time.

Before concluding any investigation in a multi site provider, establish where the records actually are and whether anything relevant sits somewhere you haven’t looked. It’s a common gap and an entirely avoidable one. There’s more on the wider challenge in interim leadership across multiple AP sites.

What About Investigations Involving Restraint or Behaviour?

A large share of AP investigations involve physical intervention, behaviour management, or an allegation arising from a highly charged incident.

Two features make these harder than in mainstream. The incidents are more frequent and more serious. And the young people involved have often had negative experiences of authority, which affects both how they describe events and how their accounts are received.

That second point cuts both ways and needs stating plainly. A young person with a history of exclusions is entitled to be believed as readily as anybody else, and an investigator who discounts an account because of who’s giving it has failed. Equally, an allegation should be tested rather than assumed, for the sake of the member of staff involved.

Every use of restraint should be recorded, reviewed by somebody uninvolved, reported to parents and to the referrer, and examined for patterns by staff member and by young person. Where a complaint concerns restraint, the investigator needs to understand both the safeguarding framework and what managing serious dysregulation actually looks like on a Tuesday afternoon.

How Should You Talk to Young People in Alternative Provision?

Rarely, carefully, and not at all where safeguarding is involved.

The default is that the provider doesn’t investigate safeguarding matters by questioning the young person. Record what was said, in their words, and pass it on.

Where it’s appropriate to speak to a young person about a non safeguarding matter, plan it. A trusted adult present, kept short, open questions only, no repetition, and never asking them to speculate about an adult’s motives.

Be alert to the possibility that a young person is describing something that happened elsewhere. AP cohorts include a high proportion of young people known to social care, and disclosures about home, another setting, or exploitation are common. Follow the safeguarding route immediately rather than continuing the conversation you were having.

How Do You Run a Staff Investigation in a Small Team?

With help, because the arithmetic doesn’t work otherwise.

Investigating officer, hearing chair and appeal chair must be three different people. In a provider with a leader and eight practitioners, they can’t be. Buying in an independent investigating officer or an external panel member is the answer, and it costs considerably less than the alternative. We cover the framework in HR investigations in schools.

Confidentiality is genuinely harder too. In a team of nine everybody knows within a day. Manage that with a clear statement about what may and may not be discussed rather than by pretending nobody has noticed, which nobody believes and which makes the rumour worse.

What Will Commissioners Want to Know?

More than you might expect, and earlier.

Commissioners typically want to know what happened in outline, what you did, what the outcome was, what has changed as a result, and whether other young people were affected. Some will want to conduct their own review, and framework terms sometimes require you to notify them of serious incidents.

Providing that openly protects the placement relationship. Being defensive, or waiting to be asked, is what costs referrals. There’s more on how commissioners think in what commissioners ask when an AP changes leadership.

From Our Experience

Many AP directors tell us they assumed the referring school would handle a complaint about their provision, and the parent went elsewhere because nobody took it.

We often see providers where the incident records were excellent at the main site and thin at the satellite, so an investigation couldn’t establish what happened at the place where it actually mattered. Nobody had decided that records should be held centrally, and the gap only appeared under scrutiny.

The providers that handle this well behave the same way every time. They contact the referrer on day one, offer them the outcome unprompted, and say what has changed. That behaviour is what keeps commissioners placing, more than any assurance document.

One more pattern worth naming. Small teams frequently try to keep an investigation informal because a formal process feels disproportionate among nine people who know each other well. It’s the most common reason an AP process falls over.

A Common Misconception

“They are on the school’s roll, so it is the school’s problem.”

It’s an understandable reading of shared responsibility, and shared doesn’t mean somebody else’s.

While a young person is with you, you’re responsible for their safety and for the conduct of your staff, and you have your own complaints procedure and your own safeguarding duties. Passing a serious matter back to the referrer without examining your own provision satisfies nobody and is exactly what draws a regulator’s interest.

There’s a better reason than the regulatory one. The young people in alternative provision have frequently been let down by systems that didn’t look closely enough. A provider that hands a serious question on rather than answering it repeats the experience that brought them to you.

Questions for AP Leaders and Directors

• Does our placement agreement say who investigates what?
• Who would investigate a concern about our most senior person?
• Do we know which designated officer covers our provision?
• Have we checked every site for records relevant to this matter?
• Who reviews our restraint records, and are they genuinely uninvolved?
• Have we told the referrer and the commissioner what has happened?

Our Perspective

Alternative provision works with young people who’ve frequently been let down by systems that didn’t look closely enough. When something goes wrong in AP, the response is watched by young people who already expect adults not to take them seriously.

Investigating properly, including when the account comes from somebody with a difficult history, isn’t only a procedural obligation. It’s the clearest way a provider shows that these young people are treated exactly as any others would be, which is frequently the reason they came to you in the first place.

Every provider’s circumstances are different, and the ones that handle this best have usually done the unglamorous work in advance. The placement agreement says who does what. Somebody external is already identified. Records sit in one place. None of it is complicated, and all of it is much harder to arrange on the day you need it.