Broken SEND #6

 I have posted before about how the Local Authority's (LA) behaviour can be interpreted as 'playing games'.  Possibly a game of tennis with each side hitting the ball back over the net.  

I put in two complaints about the Council relating to my son't special education.

The first was in relation to last year's EHCP and their failure to secure education that was specified in the plan.  Some of this was because the plan was so badly written that nobody can understand that the provision actually is.  And some of this because their provider has failed to deliver it.

The council responded with a very cursory response to my detailed complaint.  I therefore escalated it to a stage 2 complaint in the hope that it would be raised to a more senior level in the LA than the people I deal with and, essentially, who I was complaining about.

Stage 2 takes me down the road towards being able to escalate outside of the LA to the Local Government Ombudsman.  Remembering that the longer the LA can delay things, the better it is for their finances.

My second complaint, a few weeks later, related to all of the behaviour of the LA team in setting up and managing the Annual Review, preparation of the draft EHCP, and finalising it.  Because the content of an EHCP is appealable, I couldn't complain about the content, but I could about the process that led to it.  At one point this process was almost comedic in the number of different officers I had assigned to the case, and the failure to communicate the changes.

The LA complaints team then wrote back to me stating that they had had discussions with the SEND team and decided that this complaint would be combined with my first complaint.  And that the clock on my first complaint would be reset.

Suffice it to say that I was not amused by this.  I wrote back to the complaint team that the complaint is mine, and not theirs.  And if they think that merging it is, somehow, of benefit to me (and the team) then they should talk to me about it.  And that resetting the clock and making my first complaint much more complex will further delay its progress.

And in the email from the complaints team, they also included a veiled threat that I shouldn't keep complaining and should attempt to speak with the people I have a grievance against in the first instance.  I'm not sure that having a chat with a perpetrator is how complaints really work!

Anyway, joining in the game, I wrote back to the complaints team asking them for a meeting so that I could discuss the way they had handled my complaint.  This could lead to me having to find a way of complaining about the complaints team - which of course I would do through my local councillor rather than their formal processes.

30 -15, perhaps?  Let's see what happens when the ball arrives back in my court.  I will surely update the blog when this happens.


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