Hmmm, encourage complaints. That sounds like a nightmare. Why would any school want to encourage parents, students and staff to do that?

It is well-know that those involved with school management have a never-ending list of daily responsibilities. So the thought of actively encouraging people to complain, and potentially creating more work, is probably enough to make most people shudder and look the other way.

However, there are a number of important reasons why all WA schools should review their current complaints handling processes.

Let’s Start With the Legal Obligations

• S159 of the School Education Act 1999 (WA) specifies “the means by which disputes and complaints about the provision of education at the school may be dealt with” as one of the key matters that the Minister must take into account in registering, or re-registering an independent school.
• The Registration Standards for WA Non-Government Schools, Criteria 11 – Complaints Management, then provides specific detail of what schools are expected to do to comply with this obligation.
• For those schools caught by the National Quality Framework for Early Childhood Education and Care, National Quality Standard 7.3.4 requires providers to ensure that “processes are in place to ensure that all grievances and complaints are addressed, investigated fairly and documented in a timely manner”.
• For those with International Students,The National Code – Standard 8 provides detailed requirements relating to the implementation of complaints and appeals processes.
• Last, but not least, schools offering VET courses directly, must register to become a registered training organisation (RTO), which in WA means complying with the Australian Quality Training Framework 2010 – Standard 1 – Element 2.7 which also provides detailed requirements relating to complaints and appeals.

The Commercial Drivers

Under the old adage, an unhappy customer will, on average, tell 10 people about their bad experience. These 10 people will then each tell a further five people and so on. For every formal complaint a business actually receives, there are supposedly nine other customers who never complain to you directly but still tell 10 people about their bad experience. Some maths tells us that for every formal complaint you receive, no less than 500 people will have heard about your customer’s bad experience.

The bad news, for organisations that have not developed formal systems for handling complaints, is that these figures, as frightening as they are, are based on research undertaken in 1999, which was more or less before the internet really started to get going. In those days email was in its infancy, there was no Facebook, twitter or LinkedIn, and certainly not the depth of online discussion forums that dominate the net these days.

Now when someone wants to complain about your school they have the world’s biggest megaphone at their fingertips. While positive news often travels slowly, negative comments about your school will travel faster than the speed of light. One negative experience broadcast over the internet megaphone has the power to severely damage your school’s reputation and undo years of hard work.

Any way you look at it, not properly managing complaints is going to cost your school dearly. All schools get complaints. The key is to manage them effectively, and to turn them to your advantage.

Creating an Effective Complaints Handling Program

Setting up an internal system for capturing and effectively managing complaints can be a challenge. Luckily, however, you will not be the first organisation in the world that has come across this challenge.

There is in fact an International Standard for Complaints Handling and Dispute Resolution (AS ISO 10002) which provides a very useful blueprint for developing your defences against the risk of negative feedback going viral.

It’s beyond this blog to go into the finer details of developing a Complaints Handling Program, however, suffice to say that’s a key part of what we do here at CompliSpace.  Over the past 12 months we have seen an exponential increase in the number of organisations that are recognising the critical importance of complaints management. Many are going as far as actually inviting customers to complain, so they can manage these complaints within a controlled environment and avoid the obvious pitfalls of public expressions of dissatisfaction.

WA Schools Complaints Handling Program Checklist

To assist you to undertake a basic self-assessment of your school’s current complaints handling processes against Criteria 11 of the WA Non-Government Schools Registration Standards, we have developed a Complaints Handling Program Checklist.

The level of detail required may surprise you. Did you know, for example, that the Registration Standards require information about the process for raising concerns and lodging complaints to be made available via a range of mediums, including the school website? The Registration Standards even state that “to increase accessibility a simple flow diagram should be included that improves the understanding of the [complaints handling] process for parents and carers.”

If you answered “No” to any of the questions in the Checklist, it might indicate that a minimum you may wish to review certain areas of your complaints handling process.