Making a complaint to the Department should only happen once other routes have been followed. The exception to this may be where there is a child protection concern, or where a child is missing education.

  • Your first step should be to make a complaint directly to the school following its complaints procedure. If your complaint remains unresolved by teaching staff or the headteacher, we anticipate that the complaint will go to the school’s governing body or trustees as part of the school complaints process. Details of how to complain to the school governors or trustees are available at Directgov.
  • If you have already followed the school’s own complaints procedure or if there are reasons why you cannot use that procedure - for example, you feel your complaint has not been or will not be given a fair consideration due to a conflict of interest - you can forward your complaint to the Department for Education, using the online school complaints form. 

Complaints about maintained schools

For the Secretary of State to intervene in a maintained school following a complaint, he needs to be sure either that:

  • the school has acted or is proposing to act unreasonably in the exercise or performance of its functions under certain legislation;

    or
     
  • the school has failed to discharge a duty at all under certain legislation. See Appendix 1 for more information.

Complaints about Free Schools and academies

The Secretary of State will consider complaints similar to those made about maintained schools and may include where:

  • There has been undue delay, or the complaints procedure does not comply with statutory requirements, or has not been followed. For example, there is no independent member involved at the final stage of the complaint.
  • There is a breach of the funding agreement. For example, there is no religious education or requirements for provision of information are not being met.
  • A statutory duty has not been met, unless another organisation is better placed to investigate. For example, child protection matters would be for the local authority; exam malpractice would be for Ofqual.

The Secretary of State is not required to intervene in every case that is brought to his attention but he must always consider whether, in light of the information provided to him by a complainant, he should exercise his powers.

The Secretary of State cannot intervene just because he would have made a different decision to that of the school and will only do so where he is of the view that there is some practical value or worth or purpose to be served in doing so. 

The Secretary of State may consider other options to intervention to help you to resolve a complaint if appropriate, for example it may be possible to resolve the issue by agreement.

Sending your complaint

When making a complaint you should provide copies of any documentation you have about the complaint. This will help to investigate your case.

You can send your complaint through our online form, or by post, or by email.  The complaints form can be used to make a complaint about a maintained school, academy, Free School, university technical school or studio school. If you don’t know what type of school you are complaining about, then please provide the full name and address of the school to help us identify its type.

If we believe that your complaint should be dealt with by another organisation or department, we will ask your permission to send your complaint to the relevant body. Complaints relating to academies will be handled by the Education Funding Agency (EFA) as part of the Department. Complaints that concern a child with special educational needs (SEN) will be handled by the specialist SEN team.

The process of making a complaint is summarised in a flow chart which you can download from the associated resources section below.