Baroness Spielman (Con)

My Lords, I have Amendment 243D, which is unchanged from the amendment that I tabled in Committee. It is late and I shall be brief. We are in a world where we all have a much greater propensity to complain in great numbers and are doing so very frequently. AI is making it easy to complain at great length, with minimal effort, and service providers of all kinds are quite simply drowning in workload. Talk to any head teacher and you will hear this. I propose streamlining the current messy patchwork of statutory provisions to create a single streamlined model in which complaints will be triaged and considered only by the most relevant body, with information available to others when necessary. I believe that this would improve schools’ capacity to respond to serious concerns. The Minister’s response was that the issue was being considered by the Improving Education Together group of unions and other stakeholders, with which the Government are committed to co-developing policy design and implementation. Indeed, this consideration seems to have happened, because guidance was recently published, both for parents by DfE and for schools by Parentkind. The content is entirely sensible, but it does not address the major structural problem: that a minority of parents can and do spray complaints at every conceivably relevant entity, including Ofsted, DfE, the Teaching Regulation Agency, as well as school governors and MATs or local authorities. A proportion of parents do not desist, even when they get fair and reasonable responses, and these volumes are drowning out the serious complaints that absolutely need attention. And despite this guidance, there are still those different legal frameworks and best practice guidelines for maintained schools and academies, which continues to create confusion. I think schools will have hoped for greater acknowledgement of the scale of the issue and the impact it is having both on staff well-being and more generally on school capacity to respond, especially in relation to AI-generated complaints. I think they will now be hoping that the schools White Paper will provide for root and branch review of the system, including a co-ordinated system to triage complaints, such as this amendment would provide for, and perhaps also some powers for school leaders to act where there is unreasonable behaviour that goes beyond what is contemplated in this amendment. With apologies to my noble friend Lord Jackson, I think that rationalising the current problems to release the capacity that needs to be there for serious complaints is perhaps more likely to help than adding an additional layer. I therefore hope that the noble Baroness will be able to reassure me that the Government intend to go beyond mere advice as to how all parties can use the current legal framework better. Finally, Amendments 190 and 191A are also important in establishing some important principles of fairness for school staff as well as for parents, and Amendment 191 would close a small but significant loophole.