How to make a Complaint
At Teachers' we provide a high-quality service to all residents. We also know that sometimes we might get things wrong. When this happens, we want you to let us know so we can put it right for you and learn from it and improve as an organisation.
Your complaint is important to us. Here is our complaint policy that explains exactly how you can make a complaint, how we will put things right and what the process is that we will follow to resolve your complaint.
Our complaint handling is governed by the Housing Ombudsman Service. That means that we must follow their complaint handling code and that our residents can ask them to review a case at any point if they feel that we are not dealing with their complaint effectively.
Every year we must complete a self-assessment against the code. Our self-assessment for 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2024 is below:
Housing ombudsman self-assessment 2023/2024
We also compile an annual complaint handling report to report on the types of complaints we have received, our performance in responding to them and what we have improved based on our learning from complaints. Our full report is here:
Complaint handling report 2023/2024
Our Board has reviewed both the complaints handling report and housing ombudsman self-assessment against the code, and its feedback is:
The Board welcomes complaints as a valuable insight to service provision and takes complaint handling very seriously. We will continue to oversee complaint handling performance and ensure that lessons are learnt, and good practice adopted. We encourage a positive employee culture around complaints through welcoming complaints, learning from complaints, and resolving matters effectively for customers where things have gone wrong. There is room for improvement on how THA has handled complaints in the past year, and the Board will be closely overseeing these improvements and progress. A lot of work has taken place over the past few months to lay the foundations for better complaint handling, and the Board believe that THA now has the right approach and systems in place to provide positive complaint resolution for residents.
Teachers’ manage 17 homes on behalf of Thrale Almshouse & Relief In Need Charity.
Any residents of Thrale will be subject to Teachers’ complaints policy (above) and the self-assessment is the same as for Teachers’ (above) as complaints are handled on Thrale’s behalf by Teachers’ board, management team and staff. There is no annual complaint handling report, as there were no complaints in 2023/2024.