Write a School or Council Complaint Letter With AI

You’ve tried the quiet word at pick-up, the email to the class teacher, the meeting where everyone nodded and nothing happened. Months of that, and the support your child needs still isn’t there. When polite stops working, a dated, written complaint is what changes the dynamic. The school or council can’t quietly lose a letter the way they can lose a conversation. Use the free SEND Parents Help assistant to pull your scattered notes into a focused, factual complaint addressed to the right person, asking for a specific thing put right by a named date.

Start with this prompt

Open the assistant, paste this in, and fill in the brackets. It sets up the whole complaint: who it’s to, what happened in date order, and what you want put right.

I’m making a formal SEND complaint to [my child’s school / my local authority] about [the problem in one line]. I’ve already raised this with [who you’ve spoken to and when]. Here is what happened, in date order: [paste your chronology]. Please draft a firm, factual complaint letter addressed to [the head teacher / the governing body / the council complaints team]. Set out the facts clearly with dates, explain the impact on my child in concrete terms, and ask for a specific remedy: [what you actually want, for example the provision delivered, a written apology, or a meeting]. Keep the tone calm and professional, with no threats, and request a written response within a set time.

The assistant asks questions before it drafts, so rough notes are fine. New to ChatGPT? Our step-by-step setup guide gets you a free account in a couple of minutes. If your letters and emails are on paper or in PDFs, our free document tools page pulls the text out in your browser, with nothing uploaded, ready to paste in.

What makes a complaint land

A good complaint is calm and factual, never furious. The school will read it looking for a reason to make this about your behaviour rather than theirs, so don’t give them one. As you work through the draft with the assistant, hold to four habits:

• State the facts and dates plainly. Swap “the school often forgets” for “on 4 March and again on 18 March, the agreed support was not provided”.
• Say which policy or duty wasn’t met. Name the agreed provision, the EHCP section, or the deadline that was missed, not just a general sense of being let down.
• Say what you want put right, and by when. “Put the agreed support in place by the end of term” beats “do better”. A named thing by a named date is far harder to brush off.
• Keep it calm and specific. Read the draft aloud. “You clearly don’t care about my son” becomes “the agreed support has not been in place since September”. State only threats you genuinely intend to act on.

A few key facts

Complain at the lowest level first, then climb only if you have to. You usually can’t jump a stage.

• For a maintained school, the published complaints procedure has two formal stages: the head teacher, then a governing body panel. An academy runs at least three stages: informal, formal written, then a panel including someone independent of the school.
• If your complaint is about the local authority itself, a missed deadline or provision that never arrived, you use the council’s own complaints procedure first, then escalate to the ombudsman.
• For a maintained school, escalation after the governing body is the Department for Education, using its powers under sections 496 and 497 of the Education Act 1996; for an academy, the same DfE oversight follows from its funding agreement rather than these sections. It won’t overturn a single decision or order compensation, and investigations take six months or longer.
• For a council, the route is the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO), which can investigate delays, maladministration, and undelivered provision, and can recommend financial compensation. It finds fault in the large majority of SEND cases it investigates. Give the council around 16 weeks before the LGSCO will usually step in. The LGSCO investigates how the council behaved, not what happens inside a school, so this route stays open for a council failure even if your child is at an academy.
• If the failure is about provision in Section F of an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP), that duty is absolute under section 42 of the Children and Families Act 2014 unless you’ve made your own suitable alternative arrangements for that provision, and the council can’t blame the school for not delivering it. Where school is also refusing to make reasonable adjustments for a disability, that’s a separate route via disability discrimination at school.
• If the LA refuses to assess or amend an EHCP and the complaint route doesn’t resolve it, what to do when the LA refuses to assess and what to expect at the SEND Tribunal cover your legal options.

Check it yourself before you send

The assistant drafts; you verify, and you sign the letter, not the assistant. When you’re ready to start, open the assistant and paste your notes in. Before anything goes in the post or the inbox:

• Check every date and fact. Each chronology entry has to be real and accurately dated. One wrong date or invented quote lets them dismiss the whole letter, including the parts that are true.
• Confirm the right recipient. A maintained school, an academy, and a council each follow different ladders, so check you’re complaining at the correct stage.
• Trim what you’d rather not share. You can delete a reference number or your child’s date of birth before pasting; the draft works fine without them.

For more on your wider options, our guide to what to do when school is refusing to help your SEND child walks through your options, and disability discrimination at school explains a separate route through the tribunal.

Getting help

You don’t have to do this alone, and free expert help sits alongside the assistant.

• IPSEA gives free legal advice on SEND complaints and has model complaint letters you can adapt.
• Citizens Advice can help you find the right complaint route and check a letter before you send it.
• Your local SENDIASS offers free, impartial support to put a complaint together, especially where your child has an EHCP.

Sources and further reading

Legislation and official guidance

• Complain about a school: official guidance
• Education Act 1996, section 496 (Secretary of State powers over unreasonable acts)
• Education Act 1996, section 497 (Secretary of State powers where a duty is not met)
• Children and Families Act 2014, section 42 (the absolute duty to secure EHCP provision)
• Department for Education: contact and complaints
• Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman: how to complain