Records & plans
What is a complaints procedure?
A complaints procedure is how a child, or someone on their behalf, raises a concern about the home and how it is handled. Children must know it exists and be able to use it.
Accessibility is the test. A procedure in a folder in the office is not available to a child, and one written in adult language is not usable by a younger one.
Children also need routes outside the home — an advocate, the placing authority, the independent visitor, the regulator — because a complaint about the home cannot only go to the home.
The record of complaints and their outcomes is examined at inspection, and a home with no complaints at all is read as one where children do not feel able to make them.
In practice
A child who says the complaints procedure is pointless.
He has used it twice. Both times something happened and nobody went back to tell him what.
A procedure is judged by children on whether anything changed and whether they were told, and a home that resolves complaints without closing the loop has taught them not to bother.
The silence is what he learned from, not the outcome.
What goes wrong in practice
- Procedure displayed but never explained to children individually.
- External routes not made known, so every complaint goes to the home.
- Complaints recorded without their outcome or what changed.