The education secretary has said she is concerned about the amount of school time being taken up by dealing with parents’ complaints.
Bridget Phillipson was responding to questions from the sector during a live webinar with school teachers and leaders this afternoon about the impact of complaints and wider external pressures on staff.
Ms Phillipson said: “I am concerned about the growing sense I hear about the volume of complaints and the degree to which that can take up staff time.”
She added that she is keen to hear views on how this can be addressed.
Rise in parent complaints to schools
Her comments come after a Tes investigation revealed that more than eight in 10 school leaders had seen an increase in vexatious complaints, creating an “unmanageable” drain on resources.
Last year the government was urged to improve support for teachers facing increasing complaints from parents amid a spike in public referrals to the teaching regulations body.
The education secretary also said she recognised that teachers and leaders were facing many external pressures beyond the classroom and complaints, and she hoped that wider work on rebuilding external services will address this.
The education secretary and John Edwards, the director-general of the Department for Education’s regions group, answered several questions about the new Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) teams, after the government announced its plans for how the teams would operate yesterday.
Asked why the majority of the first 20 advisers for the RISE teams are from multi-academy trusts, Mr Edwards said the DfE is in the process of appointing more RISE advisers.
“We want to make sure that these RISE advisers, who are going to be working directly with schools who need the support and need that targeted improvement, have been through that process themselves,” he said.
“We’re very much looking forward to expanding our cohort with those people, wherever they come from in the system, who have got that experience of driving improvement in schools, and we know many multi-academy trusts have done a great job in that space.”
Will struggling schools be academised?
Ms Phillipson was asked for clarification on the government’s stance on academisation. Labour’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill will end automatic forced academisation for failing schools, but the education secretary explained that the worst performing schools will continued to be academised or moved into strong trusts.
She said this will also be the case for schools that are judged as “requires significant improvement” (RSI) until September 2026, from which point RISE teams will be working with them.
In a consultation document published yesterday the DfE set out plans for its RISE teams. It said that schools said by Ofsted to be in special measures would continue to be either academised or moved to another trust.
Ofsted’s proposed new inspection framework would have a second category of schools causing concern - those “requiring significant improvement”.
From September next year, RISE teams will support them for 18 months, at which point they will be reinspected by Ofsted.
If the school is still judged to require significant improvement or has “needs attention” ratings, the DfE has said its default approach will be to make structural change - through academising the school or moving it into a different trust.
Attendance challenge is ‘enormous’
Ms Phillipson also told the event that “the challenges around school attendance are enormous”.
Speaking about how the DfE intends to address attendance issues, she said: “What we have noticed and where we are going to be asking more of the sector is that there can be big variation between responsible bodies, between trusts, and even when you take account of context, some schools and trusts with a similar cohort, where some have been able to secure better rates of attendance than in others.
“Now I know that’s not for a want of trying, and it’s why we want to work with those who are finding it harder, to make sure that they’ve got support.”
Asked if the DfE would set out in a White Paper its vision and delivery strategy for the schools sector, Ms Phillipson said she hopes to provide more details in “due course”, but she did not make any commitment to a White Paper.
The government is paying particular attention to special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) reform, she added.
Some of the work required to get to a better SEND system “will take longer”, she said, discussing the government’s working groups on inclusion.
For the latest education news and analysis delivered every weekday morning, sign up for the Tes Daily newsletter
