Children and Young People’s Services complaints

Lambeth Children and Young People’s Service (CYPS) aims to ensure that you receive reliable, responsive, and effective services. However, sometimes things do go wrong and the complaints procedure helps the Council to put matters right.

What we do

Schools and school admissions

How to complain

CYPS deals with complaints relating to social care and education

Complaints relating to social care include;

• Children looked after
• Children in need
• Children leaving care
• Children with Disabilities
• Family support and child protection
• Social work hospital teams
• Adoption
• Referral and Assessment
• Unaccompanied Asylum seeking children
• Social Work

Complaints relating to education include;

• Access (including awards and benefits)
• Asset management planning and development
• Children's Information Service
• Customer Services/One Stop Shop
• Early Years Services
• Education Business Partnership
• Contracts Monitoring Unit
• Finance
• Research and Statistics Unit
• Educational Psychology Service
• Ethnic minority Achievement Team
• Governor Services
• Looked After Children's Education
• School Advisory Service
• Schools Human Resources
• Social Inclusion (including Child Protection, Pupils out of school, Pupil Welfare, Child Employment, and Education Otherwise)
• Special Education Needs
• Youth Offending Team

Schools and school admissions

Please visit the admissions appeals page for details of the process if your child is not offered a school place.

If you have a complaint about a school, please contact the school directly as each school has their own complaints procedure. The general escalation process is;

• First of all complain to the Headteacher.
• If you are dissatisfied with the outcome, then complain to the Chair of Governors of the school.
• If you are still dissatisfied then please contact the Complaints manager at the address below.

How to complain

We want to make it easy for you to complain if you have had a poor service from us.

You can make a complaint by completing the online complaints form. Alternatively a complaint can be made by email, telephone, in writing or face to face in one of our offices using the contact details at the top of the page. 

For guidance on making a complaint, including the information we need from you, go to the how to make a complaint page.

There are statutory guidelines around social care complaints. Learn more about the social care procedure guidelines.