Decision Report 201605476

Summary

Mrs C complained about the support provided to her children (Child A and Child B) by their primary school. In particular, she considered that Child A did not receive enough support to cope with stressful situations. Mrs C considered that Child B was not appropriately monitored to see if they needed additional support. Mrs C also complained about the primary school's communication with her and other agencies about this, as well as about their record-keeping. In addition, she was dissatisfied with how her complaint was handled by the council.

We found that the primary school followed the appropriate staged intervention process to identify and implement the children's additional support needs. We did not find evidence of the primary school's communication being unreasonable. Although we found some errors in the school's minutes of meetings Mrs C attended, we did not find evidence that their records were significantly inaccurate. We found that there was a delay in the council acknowledging Mrs C's complaint and that they should have condensed their requests for information from Mrs C into a more manageable format. However, overall we found that their complaints handling was reasonable. We did not uphold Mrs C's complaints.

We considered that, given the concerns that Mrs C raised, the council should have informed her that she could request an assessment for a coordinated support plan and that they should have signposted her to the Additional Support Needs Tribunal, so we made a recommendation about this.

Recommendations

What we said should change to put things right in future:

• Where appropriate, information should be provided on how to request an assessment for a coordinated support plan. There should also be appropriate signposting to the Additional Support Needs Tribunal.

We have asked the organisation to provide us with evidence that they have implemented the recommendations we have made on this case by the deadline we set.