There is no single issue to blame for the severe recruitment and retention crisis affecting both school leadership and teaching.
A decade of heavy real-terms pay cuts of around 20% (against inflation) is perhaps the clearest contributing factor.
But heavy workload and the toll the job can take on wellbeing have also dented the attractiveness of what should be a rewarding career path. Again, there are many factors driving both, ranging from funding pressures to the damaging impact of Ofsted inspection.
The impact of complaints by parents has been spoken about somewhat less. But we are increasingly hearing from our members how they have not only seen a sharp increase in complaints, but also a big upturn in those they consider to be clearly vexatious or baseless. These complaints often have a harmful effect on wellbeing and directly drive stress and workload among school leaders and their staff.
We know that in the vast majority of cases, the relationship between parents and their primary schools is excellent.
Of course, school staff are human and will not get everything right – sometimes mistakes get made. That’s why complaints systems are, quite rightly, in place.
But in a world where people are increasingly quick to jump to formal complaints procedures, these systems appear to be being used more and more – and not always in the right way.
In an NAHT survey completed by 1,144 school leaders, 94% reported an increase in complaints over the last three years.
Notably, 57% blamed unmet SEND. In recent years, funding to support pupils with SEND has not kept pace with demand, leaving parents frustrated as under-resourced schools and local authorities sometimes struggle to offer children the right provision.
Elsewhere, 35% of our members cited attendance and holidays as contributing to the increase in complaints and 34% pinpointed the conduct of other parents.
Other factors included parking and transport issues, social media, and clashes after schools had raised safeguarding concerns.
However, school leaders are telling us that complaints systems are increasingly not being used appropriately – 83% said they had seen an increase in vexatious complaints.
These may include baseless or unreasonable complaints which arise for all manner of reasons, including for instance when parents take out anger over a specific issue on a school, even when they might not have direct responsibility for it.
At the extreme end of the scale, we have seen instances of the complaints process being used in a deliberate attempt to cause distress for the professionals concerned.
It would take further research to understand the reasons for the rise in vexatious complaints. However, the government has often used baseless public criticism of schools in an attempt to drive a wedge between the profession and parents for cheap political gain.
In addition, schools are increasingly seeing pupils impacted by the repercussions of a decade of under-investment in children’s social care and mental health services, and cuts to welfare support. Staff do their best to help and even though they do not always have the resources or expertise they sometimes take the brunt of parents’ anger.
One of the biggest issues is school complaints policies being ignored and complaints being escalated directly to the Department for Education (DfE) or Ofsted. We want to see more being done to ensure that parents making complaints have to demonstrate they have been through the school’s system before escalating things further.
Another problem is that parents can make the same complaint to multiple agencies at the same time – everyone from the DfE, Ofsted, the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA), the Teaching Regulation Agency, and even the local MP. This means school leaders have to deal with the same complaints repeatedly. We would like the DfE to ensure that a complaint can only be dealt with by one body at a time and ideally not then re-investigated by a different agency.
These issues were confronted head-on in a motion which was passed at our annual conference in early May. The motion called for a proper process to be established for determining who deals with complaints that are escalated and added that it should not be possible to make complaints anonymously, apart from in exceptional circumstances (such as serious safeguarding concerns).
It said that governors or trustees should take appropriate action to protect school leaders from malicious or vexatious complaints – including litigation or barring in exceptional circumstances.
The way in which parental complaints are fuelling workload in schools is an issue that is being looked at by the Workload Reduction Taskforce and it is expected to publish its recommendations soon.
High workload, as well as the impact of the role on their wellbeing was cited in an NAHT survey of nearly 1,900 school leaders as a key reason why they are thinking of leaving the profession. The Crisis Point report (NAHT, 2023) revealed that 51% of school leaders are considering leaving the profession within the next three years for reasons other than retirement, with 83% identifying workload as a factor.
Parental complaints may be only one factor contributing to workload, but finding a way to reduce vexatious complaints and reform the complaints process while still providing the accountability needed to address genuine grievances would still make an important contribution to easing the unsustainable workload school leaders and teachers are facing.
- Paul Whiteman is general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers. Find his previous articles for Headteacher Update via www.headteacher-update.com/authors/paul-whiteman
Headteacher Update Summer Term Edition 2024
This article first appeared in Headteacher Update's Summer Term Edition 2024. This edition was sent free of charge to UK primary schools in May 2024. A free-to-access digital edition is also available via www.headteacher-update.com/content/downloads
Further information & resources
- NAHT: Crisis Point, 2023: http://tinyurl.com/ymtszcbp