“I’ve had more complaints at governor panel level in the last six to 12 months than I had in the previous 10 years put together,” says Gwyn Williams, headteacher of Lymm High School in Cheshire.

Previously, Williams would almost always resolve complaints via an informal conversation with the parent. “It was rare for them to go beyond me,” he says.

But now he is experiencing a “willingness of some parents to just keep escalating and not take ‘no’ for an answer”, leading to complaints reaching “governors, tribunals, the Department for Education, local authorities, newspapers, Ofsted”.

“There’s no question in my mind that the number of complaints and the strength of those complaints have increased,” Williams says.

It’s a similar story in Kent, where Louise Lythgoe, director of primary at the eight-academy trust Turner Schools, says that up until last year, she doesn’t remember parents making any formal complaints that worked their way up the trust’s complaints ladder.

Then last academic year, across the trust’s five primaries, “we had five complaints that were not resolved at the informal stage one”, she says. That number is already on the rise. “We’re seeing a twofold increase in the number of complaints” between last year and this, she adds.

Nationwide statistics back up these experiences. In research carried out by the National Governance Association, 82 per cent of governors and trustees said complaints had increased in their setting in the past three to five years, with 50 per cent reporting significant increases. This mirrors a 2024 Tes investigation, which found that more than eight in 10 school leaders had experienced an increase in vexatious complaints.

In total, parents made more than 5 million complaints to schools last year, according to the charity Parentkind. That’s 5 million complaints for schools to respond to.

This is an issue of which the government is well aware. Last year education secretary Bridget Phillipson expressed her concern about the rising number, while last month the government co-published new complaints guidance for schools and parents, which urges schools to remember: “Parents are people, too.”

But what has caused this increase in complaints in the first place?

Complaints taking up staff time

First, it’s important to note that “we are talking about a minority” of parents, Williams says. And schools want to engage with reasonable complaints.

“Parental complaints are a healthy part of the system,” says David Scales, headteacher of Astrea Academy Woodfields in Doncaster. “Receiving feedback from parents about what’s going right and what’s not going right is immensely valuable.”

But he adds: “What is really challenging is complaints that are designed to undermine the school, undermine teachers [or] spread misinformation.” And the higher complaints are escalated, the more time they take up.

Developments in technology and communications have certainly played a role in this.

“It is significantly easier to make a complaint” to a school today than it ever has been before, says Susannah Daniel, headteacher of All Saints Infants and Junior Schools, part of Anthem Schools Trust, in Reading.

‘What is really challenging is complaints that are designed to undermine the school, undermine teachers or spread misinformation’

In addition, says Andrea Atkinson, education director for secondary at the 37-school trust E-ACT, the internet has made “information more widely available than ever before”, particularly on legally complex topics such as special educational needs and disabilities.

“There’s so much more knowledge and literature around SEND provision and expectation,” she says. “This knowledge is empowering complaints. And that’s double-edged: of course, it’s great that parents are more informed” - but what they choose to do with that information is often “causing more problems for schools”.

The prevalence of social media has exacerbated this. Frank Young, chief policy officer at Parentkind, explains how WhatsApp groups give parents “permission” to complain. “You hear two or three other parents saying, ‘Yeah, I’ve noticed that as well. I think I’m gonna say something,’” he says - then others follow suit.

Increasing AI use

In the past year or two, the rise of AI has also become a factor.

Hannah Carter, headteacher of Orchards Academy in Kent, says that while she has not experienced an increase in complaints overall, she has seen a rise in AI-generated complaints.

“A lot of parents might not have had positive experiences [of education] themselves,” she explains, “so they might feel reluctant about showing up [to complain] in person.” Using AI allows them to “feel more confident in their level of literacy and the language they’re using”.

But parents using AI to make complaints creates additional complications for schools, with Carter pointing out that AI-generated complaints often reference policies that are out of date and “jumble legislation, especially around safeguarding and the role of children’s services”.

Claire Pannell, executive director of professional services and general counsel at Anthem Schools Trust, which runs 11 primaries and four secondaries, has also experienced the complexities that AI brings.

“What is most confusing is when it quotes legislation that doesn’t exist. It takes extra time to unpick these really long, complex complaints,” she says, adding that the use of AI puts undue stress on headteachers because of the weight of the legal references within the letters. “It’s dangerous when parents use it in this way without fact-checking because it becomes like an uninformed, incorrect lawyer acting on their behalf.”

Williams adds that part of the reason why AI has contributed so significantly to the rise in complaints is because it “finds solutions for you, acts as a cheerleader, and pushes you to keep going”. He is seeing “more and more parents who have that view of ‘I just need to keep going and eventually I’ll get what I want, because social media and AI are telling me that’”.

He adds that ultimately this leads to further tensions because it’s very difficult to tell a parent they are factually wrong about, say, a detail in the SEND code of conduct, when AI has told them otherwise. “AI is making parents feel more aggrieved,” Williams says.

‘The Overton window has changed’

But the rise in complaints isn’t all down to technology. Scales also points to changes in our political climate, “particularly characterised by the Brexit referendum” and the “our freedom, our rights, our country” mentality that right-wing politicians have since popularised.

“The Overton window has changed,” he says, referring to the public consensus on what’s acceptable, and he adds that a mindset of control - “Why are you telling me what to do? But my rights! My child’s freedom!” - is increasingly common, meaning that parents are more likely to push back against school policies; for example, around behaviour sanctions and uniform rules that they perceive to be unfair.

This was all already in the works before 2020, Scales says, and then Covid “really turbocharged the feeling that ‘the state has taken control’”.

The pandemic fundamentally changed the dynamic of home-school relationships, which Atkinson at E-ACT links to the increase in complaints.

The role of the pandemic

During the lockdown period when many students had to learn remotely, “schools became an alien place for some parents”, Atkinson says, pointing out that since then many have not returned to in-person parents’ events. “I went through that with my own daughter, from Year 7 to 11, never having a face-to-face parents’ evening,” she says, clarifying that E-ACT schools do hold in-person meetings.

But many settings, Atkinson says, “became places where parents didn’t feel welcome”. And if a parent hasn’t met a teacher in-person, they might be less likely to think of them “as a real person with emotional intelligence” who could be personally affected by a complaint.

Matthew Kraft, professor of education at Brown University, suggests that, for some parents, the shift to home-learning “catalysed an awareness and an interest among parents to be better informed about what’s happening inside of schools”. Over time, this has given them more reason to complain when they believe something is wrong.

Kraft says he has seen “parents being more actively involved and feeling as though they have a right to be”. Add to this the “ratcheting up of competition in the labour market, so parents are concerned about their kids’ performance, and how that affects exam scores and access to higher education”, and the stakes just get higher.

Changes in parenting

This plays into what Scales sees as a “social change around parenting”. “Thirty years ago people spent a lot less time with their children. Now people spend much more time with them and are more protective,” he says, referencing the American academic Jonathan Haidt, who has tracked this shift away from “free-range kids”.

Meanwhile, Young at Parentkind puts the rise in complaints down to another fact: “Life is getting more stressful,” he says. “Teachers are no exception to that, but for parents, too, their lives are busier. The pressure on parents - in terms of the forever cost-of-living crisis, having to balance work, childcare and simply trying to do a decent job of being a parent - is really hard.”

“You’re starting to see this boil over,” he adds. “The education that your child is getting is going to be one of the most important things to you, so naturally you’ll be worried when you hear about things going wrong” - hence the urge to complain.

Public sector cuts

And whereas in previous decades families received more support from other public services such as social care, because of funding cuts, schools are now increasingly seen as the only place that parents can turn to.

Lythgoe in Kent has seen this first-hand. “If you want a meeting with your child’s SEN caseworker, you’re probably looking at [a wait of] at least a few months,” she says. “If you want a meeting with your child’s headteacher, they’ll probably be able to see you that day or the next day.”

But the pressures that complaints are putting on to already-overstretched school staff are unsustainable. Lythgoe recalls an investigation into a single complaint that took up “a week of my time”.

What’s more, it seriously affects leaders on a personal level. “My mental health is massively impacted by complaints,” says Daniel.

Trust-wide solutions

So what can be done to support schools, while allowing parents the opportunity to complain when necessary?

For Pannell, a change to Anthem’s complaints policy has helped. Schools typically have two or three stages in the escalation process, including school-level investigations by a class teacher and/or headteacher, and a formal panel hearing, where an external, independent person (perhaps a member of the local community) joins governors or trustees in investigating the complaint.

But Anthem has introduced a fourth stage, before the panel hearing, where senior trust leaders investigate. This has provided “an additional opportunity for [the trust] to resolve the complaint internally” before the headteacher is subject to a “stressful” more formal panel stage. “It protects our headteachers,” Pannell says.

She adds that the trust trains “all of our headteachers on complaints handling”, while all Anthem schools have a complaints coordinator, an additional role for an existing member of staff who also receives the in-trust training, which helps to ease the burden on heads.

Young at Parentkind also points to the usefulness of training teachers in working with parents, as well as the benefits of a strong parent-teacher association (PTA). “PTAs are often the missing piece of the jigsaw in education,” he says, explaining that an effective PTA - one that “reflects the community of parents in the school” - is “a conduit [for a school] to speak easily and openly with the parent body”.

Ideally, the positive communication that a PTA enables leads to parents feeling more like they are part of the school. They may, therefore, make fewer complaints.

Changes at policy level

But others flag the need for policy change to improve the situation nationally.

At the moment, government guidelines state that parents should exhaust all stages of a school-level complaints process before escalating the matter to Ofsted, the local authority or the DfE. But in practice, parents have the power to complain directly to these other bodies in the first instance.

Williams believes this should not be allowed and that “parents shouldn’t be able to complain to other bodies, in particular Ofsted, without having gone through the school complaints system first”.

Atkinson agrees. “There needs to be a mechanism of referring back to the school,” she says, “because schools can resolve 99 per cent of complaints.”

Scales suggests that this could be achieved through a more joined-up system between schools, local authorities, Ofsted and the DfE, which would only allow parents to escalate a complaint once they could prove they had engaged with the school first.

The government, alongside ParentKind and other sector organisations, has recently worked to ease this situation with its publication of new complaints guidance for schools and parents. But how much will it change?

“Anything that helps to make the current situation better is welcome,” says Scales of the guidance. “It is important that our families know we are there to support and listen to them and work together.”

However, Williams is more dismissive. “Whilst the guidance generally contains sensible advice, it is rather bland and I’m really not sure it adds much to the way most schools go about dealing with complaints already,” he says, adding that he doesn’t believe it meaningfully addresses concerns leaders have around parents making “unfounded, trivial or unreasonable” complaints, nor “the trend of more parents automatically escalating complaints”.

A new social contract

It is with bated breath, then, that many in the sector are holding out for the schools White Paper, due in the next month, which is expected to outline further policy on this worsening situation.

But, given the vast political, social and technological changes that have played a role in the increasing number of parent complaints, this might be one issue that even government can’t solve. “We need to redraw our social contract,” says Scales.

Tes contacted the DfE for comment but did not receive a response in time for publication.

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