This is part of our “Cause for Complaint” series, where we speak with experts about school complaints management, exploring the challenges, trends, and practical solutions that can help schools and families work together more effectively.

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Andy Williams - former Teacher of the Year and long-serving Deputy Headteacher - brings over 30 years’ experience from schools in Birmingham, Plymouth, Cardiff and rural Monmouthshire. He spent 14 years leading behaviour, relationships and restorative practice in a large South-East Wales comprehensive, work that earned the school the Restorative Service Quality Award. “My whole remit was the quality of relationships,” he says.

Andy now works nationally as a consultant and keynote speaker and is completing doctoral research at Cardiff University.

From Classroom Teacher to Deputy Head: Leading Through Others

Stepping into senior leadership changed how Andy could influence complaints and behaviour.

“If I was going to encapsulate that in a nutshell, it’s the difference between affecting change within your own space and then affecting change with and through others.” As a deputy head, his work depended on heads of year, heads of department and class teachers enacting a shared approach to relationships and conflict. That meant the school’s core intentions had to be clear, not just to pupils and parents, but to staff as well.

At the same time, the nature of the issues reaching his desk shifted. Transition from 39 feeder primaries into a school of nearly 2,000, setting decisions in GCSE years, and arrangements for pupils with additional learning needs all became flashpoints for parental concern.

Complaints in a Changing Landscape: Social Media and the Pandemic

Andy’s time as deputy head coincided with the rapid growth of social media - and later the pandemic - both of which reshaped how and when complaints arrived. “My Mondays were very much focused on what had happened on the weekends because of the influence of social media and parents wanting the school to ‘sort it out’.” He distinguishes between:

• External issues - incidents online or in the community that parents still expected the school to resolve.

• Internal issues - peer relationships breaking down at “unstructured times, so break times, but also periods of end of break um end of lunch, end of day, you know, waiting for the buses and so on.”

Post-pandemic, he saw a change in expectations around provision when pupils were absent: “Parents were expecting work to be set post pandemic even if the child was ill. They were expecting the teacher to provide individualised work as if they were still in the pandemic.”

Alongside this, he noticed “an increasing sense that it’s the school’s responsibility to bring up a child” as families navigated financial pressures and work demands. The result is a more complex “social contract” between home and school - and more opportunities for misaligned expectations to surface as complaints.

What Schools Are - and Aren’t - There to Do

For Andy, one of the most important tasks for any school is to be honest and precise about its role. “The school is best placed to support the growth of those young people around learning. This is a learning organisation. They’re not clinical psychologists, they’re not social workers, they’re not mental health professionals, but their focus is on the learning of that young person.”

That clarity has to be expressed in language parents can understand and accept. For Andy, that means being explicit about the underlying intention: “If the intention of the school is very clear, then very few people will argue with that: it’s about young people’s growth and learning to lead their lives.”

Once that intention is in place, everything else should follow. “Every policy in the school has to align with that intention, and it has to use the language of need. It has to use the language of values, and it has to be focused upon learning and growth.”

He argues that the process for creating policies matters as much as the text itself: “Involve parents as much as possible in the creation of policy. Involve them in the creation of how that policy is enacted, but always make it clear that this is about learning and growth.”

When policies, systems and communications are rooted in a shared intention, disagreements still happen - but the basis for trust is stronger.

Behaviour as Learning, Not Just Discipline

A central theme in Andy’s thinking is that behaviour should be treated as part of learning, not as a separate domain governed by punishment. He draws a sharp contrast between how schools treat academic mistakes and behavioural ones: “As a pupil, if I make a mistake with my essay, the teacher comes along and writes some constructive feedback in the margins. I take that and then I develop my abilities to write essays. However, if I make a behavioural mistake then it’s a very different approach. It’s deliberate, it’s personal, it calls for sanction and censure, and if it doesn’t improve, the next time that sanction and censure increases.”

For Andy, this disconnect is a structural problem. He believes the way schools repair relationships after conflict should mirror how they build them in the first place: “When relationships are repaired or conflict is resolved, it is based on those values and those needs. There’s no difference between the way learning is developed in the classroom and the way conflict is resolved when conflicts happen, because behaviour is learned.”

For Andy, the question is whether schools frame conflict as an interruption to learning - or as an integral part of it.

Resolution and Perceived Resolution: Closing the Loop

Andy is particularly interested in the gap between a complaint that is procedurally resolved and one that feels resolved to the parent.

He highlights the risk of “lingering dissatisfaction” when schools don’t explicitly close the loop: “Those lingering dissatisfaction, where the loop hasn’t been closed, are the ones that come back. And then you have this sort of ‘oh gosh, we’re having this conversation again’. It’s tiring, it’s draining, it frazzles teachers out, and I’m sure it does the same for parents.”

Two elements matter here:

• Timeliness - “Making sure that a conflict never got too big too quickly, it was very much about the speed of the response to the parent.”

Listening for Needs, Not Just Demands - “The ability for those people who were listening to the parents to listen effectively - using reflective listening - being able to listen to somebody who’s articulating a complaint or a concern, and be able to listen so that you’re identifying what the needs are behind what they’re saying.”

Parents may arrive using the language of demand: “Sometimes a need will be articulated as a demand - ‘you need to’ - so trying to move away from ‘you need to’ to ‘what is it that you’re saying here?’”

For Andy, careful listening, precision about what the complaint is actually about, and identifying the underlying needs all help move towards a genuine resolution - rather than a partial one that resurfaces later.

The Role of Language in Handling Concerns and Complaints

Andy argues, that language used often pushes school-parent conversations into a more adversarial space. Words like “sanction”, “isolation”, “detention” and “exclusion” carry connotations of wrongdoing and punishment, shaping how parents interpret what’s happened before any real discussion begins.

“We can get caught up with the language of the criminal justice system… rewards, sanctions, yellow card, red card, isolation, detention, exclusion - all criminal justice language, which I don’t think is helpful.”

He has seen how this vocabulary influences complaints. When behaviour is described in punitive terms, parents can quickly assume intent, blame or injustice. As a result, concerns escalate faster - not because the underlying issue is more serious, but because the language surrounding it feels accusatory.

This is why Andy pays close attention to precision and shared understanding. He highlights how easily terms can become blurred, particularly in emotive areas: “There was a need to disaggregate out what was in fact bullying and what was perceived bullying.”

For Andy, careful, accurate language helps parents and schools talk about the same thing, reduces unnecessary escalation, and keeps the focus on how to support the young person’s development - rather than on arguing over labels.

Preparing Staff for Conflict

Despite how often conflict features in school life, Andy sees a striking gap in teacher training. “When I run workshops, I ask at the beginning how many teachers have had formal conflict-resolution training, and very seldom does a hand go up. I find that amazing.”

From his own career, the mismatch is obvious: “If I’m honest, 60% of my time was spent in conflict resolution, even as a teacher, and I taught in some particularly challenging areas.”

Without training, staff can fall into instinctive but unhelpful responses when confronted by distressed or angry parents. Andy recalls occasions where teachers, trying to build rapport, ended up reinforcing complaints rather than de-escalating them: “Even a throwaway comment would exacerbate the conflict, and it would come to me and I would be quite shocked. That doesn’t help in a conflict situation, and it snowballs.”

For Andy, conflict resolution is not an add-on or something reserved for senior leaders. It should sit alongside curriculum and pedagogy as part of every teacher’s professional learning.

Philosophy and Culture: Zero Tolerance or Holistic Growth?

Underpinning Andy’s view of complaints is a broader question about school philosophy. He describes one common approach: “For many schools, the philosophy is to get as high qualifications for our kids as possible. And in order to do that quickly, we punish and reward. We don’t have time for resolution”

External pressures reinforce this: “For private schools, it’s a business. But state schools in England particularly still have a lot of carrot and stick around Ofsted and one-word judgments. So if your school leadership and philosophy is zero tolerance, then that informs everything you do.”

By contrast, Andy’s own work was driven by a longer-term view of young people’s development: “For me, the impact of the school will be measured 10 years down the line, not on results day in August.”

And he emphasises that culture cannot simply be declared from above: “I can sit around a shiny table and tell the staff what the vision of the school is, but that isn’t a shared vision. It’s just a vision shared.”

Complaints, in this light, are one way of seeing whether the school’s stated intentions - about learning, growth and relationships - are actually lived out in day-to-day interactions.

Conclusion

Conflict, Andy reminds us, is inevitable - “you’re going to get it and you’ll get it every day” - but how schools frame and respond to that conflict is a matter of choice.

By rooting policies in needs and values, treating behaviour as part of learning, training staff to listen for what sits behind a complaint, and aligning practice with a genuinely shared purpose, schools can move complaints away from adversarial battles and towards conversations about growth.

For Andy, complaints are a live test of whether a school’s stated intentions - about learning, relationships and the kind of adults it hopes its pupils will become - are truly shaping its culture, one conversation at a time.

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