Making a Complaint

You should attempt to make contact with the relevant member of staff in the department/service to raise your concerns – e.g. module leader or student services. If you are unable to, or unwilling to make contact with them, then you should speak with their line manager as a first point of contact. 

We suggest you try and arrange a meeting over email and then take notes in the meeting as a summary of the discussion. Hopefully your complaint will be resolved at this stage but;

• If you are unhappy with the response, you can escalate this to the head of the school or the manager of the service.
• If you are unhappy with the response from their manager or the department, then you can move to stage two of the complaints process.

You need to complete the Complaint Form, found by clicking here and prepare a statement explaining your your concerns, what happened and what your complaint is regarding. For the best chance of an upheld complaint, we recommend you do the following:

• Write a statement explaining that you have tried to resolve your concerns locally (you’ll need evidence to demonstrate this), what happened, how it impacted you and what outcome you would like. It can often help to create a short timeline of issues at the start of the statement for clarity.
• We suggest you read through relevant codes of conduct, policies etc – you might find that there has been a breach which you can reference in your complaint.
• Gather together supporting evidence e.g. relevant documents, emails etc.
• Send the form and supporting evidence to OSCAR, who will allocate your complaint to a complaint handler. 

Stage 3 is optional and you would only go to this stage if you were unhappy with the outcome or handling of the complaint at Stage 2​. You can not progress to stage 3 without completing stage 2.

Stage 3 complaints are considered by a panel of three people who will look at the complaint in its entirety and decide on an outcome together. 

It is worth us also saying that, if once you have completed the University’s full complaints procedure (ie, all three stages) then you can also take your complaint to an external company known as the OIA. Please email us for more information on this using the button at the bottom of the page.