7. A ‘complaints handling' system designed to ensure complaints are ultimately discontinued....
My experience of Ringwood School's Complaints Procedures was, frankly, pretty poor.
In my opinion, the 'system' has been purpose designed to waste as much of your valuable time as possible, grind you down with frustration and then finally infuriate you - by the Complaints Panel completely disregarding the 'evidence' you've put forward, in a one sided decision that will only ever favour the school.
What I've established is that, unless you can afford to take the School to court, if the School and/or Board of Governors don't want to agree with what you say and even if it is blatantly obvious that you are in the right and they are in the wrong, they can continue to do exactly as they please - with impunity.
They can (and do) because no-one is actually governing how schools operate.
Schools are now effectively autonomous and unsupervised
Whilst it might seem that each school is under the direction and control of its Local Education Authority, they aren't! And, neither are schools or LEA's under the control of the Department for Children, Schools & Families (DCSF). This is a consequence of government policy to (evade/escape from responsibility/legal liability) by devolving responsibility away from the centre down to the schools - and ultimately each school's Board of Governors.
Ofsted?
Ofsted inspections are short, focused inspections that take no more than two days in a school and concentrate on close interaction with senior managers in the school, taking self-evaluation evidence as the starting point.
And, the Ofsted report of 2004, which dealt with the issue of inclusive schools and children with special educational needs and disabilities, noted that few schools evaluate their provision for pupils with SEN systematically so that they can establish how effective the provision is, with many schools undertaking too little forward planning to ensure that provision was in place. It said that “when they coped poorly, this was often attributed to pupils' difficulties rather than the school's inability to provide adequately.”
You can draw your own conclusions about the relevance of the school's Ofsted report to what actually goes on!