Complaints & Information Officer

3 month contract, 2 days per week in office.

PURPOSE OF THE JOB: The main point of contact for complaint handling and investigations for corporate complaints and Children’s Act complaints for the Children & Education Directorate. Provide advice, guidance and support to managers on effective complaint handling, relevant policies, and Ombudsman guidance and expectations. To monitor trends, themes, and outcomes of complaints, ensuring these feed into service improvement plans so that learning from complaints is analysed and linked with wider learning from the directorate’s quality assurance framework(s). Share these insights and learning with leaders and practitioners to inform strategy and service improvements to provide the highest quality support to our children, young people and families.

KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES:

• Manage effective Stage 1 complaint investigations and contribute to Stages 2 and 3 as required to ensure due process and fair resolution for service users.
• Serve as a subject matter expert on the LGSCO complaints handling code and LBH policy; interpreting and applying these standards and challenging service managers where investigation outcomes do not meet required quality or legal benchmarks.
• Act as a strategic thinking partner for Area Leadership, using complaint insights to identify systemic service failures and proactively designing intervention solutions to mitigate organisational risk.
• Work directly with service users (including, but not limited to, young people, parents and carers, family members, local residents, and foster carers), advocates, and legal representatives, in relation to individual complaints and ensure they are kept informed about the progress of their complaint.
• Learn from best practice and innovations in other local authorities and organisations to support a continuous improvement approach to complaint handling practice with the service user experience in mind.
• Gather and organise information about complaints from children and families, producing reports as required and contributing to the effective dissemination of this information to a range of audiences both internal and external.
• Work closely with services across C&E to ensure that complaint themes and feedback from children and families is linked with service improvement, the audit and wider quality assurance programme to ensure the child’s voice is central to learning and improvement work.
• Facilitate a programme of engagement ensuring that learning from complaints is proactively responded to at all levels including senior management and frontline professionals.
• Collate, analyse and report on a range of qualitative and quantitative management data, performance, evaluation and outcome information, producing and monitoring the implementation of plans to support service improvement and development.
• Actively consider the impact of systemic and everyday racism and oppression upon the lives of children and families and the impact and learning about professional practice in this context.
• Ensure that C&E values and ethics alongside our Children and Families Systemic Principles and values and anti-racist position statements are embedded in our quality assurance work and evidenced through the practice that we quality assure.
• Ensure that complaints activity links with partner services and partner agencies to enable wider organisational learning.
• Liaise with LBH Business Analysis & Complaints Team regarding LBH complaints procedure and provide routine advice & guidance to C&E colleagues regarding complaints process.
• Serve as the Directorate’s lead expert on statutory and corporate complaint legislation, making final determinations on complex and high-risk cases. Only escalate to Legal or Senior Management on matters of significant litigation risk or novel points of law.
• Lead on the resolution of complex cases referred to the Local Government & Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO), representing the Directorate in negotiations and determining the Council’s formal position.
• Maintain up to date records using designated systems and tools, e.g., logging new complaints, case progress records, and completing the case workflow in the complaints case management system.
• As a member of the C&E Complaints & Information team, provide cover for colleagues on specific tasks as required.
• Provide additional capacity and support to information requests (i.e., FOIs, SARs) as directed by the team manager, to ensure compliance and continuity of service delivery during periods of peak demand or staff absence.
• Proactively identify and address performance gaps in complaint handling across the Directorate, developing and delivering targeted training and 'best practice' toolkits for managers to ensure statutory compliance and reduce Stage 2 escalations.
• Provide official deputised line management and day-to-day supervision for the Compliance Assistant (SO1) and Information Officer (Sc6) during the permanent line manager's absence (including staff leave), or when required for specific projects and peak workload management.