The Ombudsman's final decision
Summary: We will not investigate this complaint that the Council failed to take action when the complainant reported that her son’s school has unlawfully taken him off roll. This is because there is insufficient injustice to warrant investigation.
The complaint
The complainant, Mrs X, complains that the Council failed to take action when she reported that her son’s school had unlawfully taken him off roll.
The Ombudsman’s role and powers
We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’, which we call ‘fault’. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint, which we call ‘injustice’. We provide a free service, but must use public money carefully. We do not start or continue an investigation if we decide any injustice is not significant enough to justify our involvement. (Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended, section 34(B))
How I considered this complaint
I considered information provided by the complainant.
I considered the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.
My assessment
Mrs X’s son has special educational needs and an Education Health and Care Plan. She says that, in the course of an appeal before the First-tier Tribunal (Special Educational Needs and Disability), the Judge specified that an arrangement in place at the time should cease. Under this arrangement, Mrs X’s child had not attended the school on Wednesdays.
Mrs X says the school misled the Judge to the effect that it would make a named teaching assistant available to support her son when the arrangement ended. However, it did not immediately arrange for her son to receive the support and Mrs X says that, as a result, the school prevented him from attending for two successive Wednesdays in April 2023. She contends that this amounts to the Council unlawfully off-rolling him.
Mrs X brought the matter to the Council’s attention in November 2023. She complains that it did not initially respond and that, when it did so, it did not uphold her complaint. She regards it as unreasonable that the Council relied on the narrative provided by the school.
The Ombudsman will not investigate the Council’s response to Mrs X’s complaint that her son was unlawfully taken off roll. It is not a good use of public resources to investigate complaints about how complaints have been dealt with, if we are unable to deal with the substantive issue.
In this case, the substantive issue is whether fault on the school’s part cost Mrs X’s son two days of education. In itself, any injustice flowing from this is not so significant as to warrant the Ombudsman’s intervention. That being the case, we will not investigate how the Council responded to it.
Final decision
We will not investigate Mrs X’s complaint because there is insufficient injustice to warrant investigation.
Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman