How to make a complaint
Before you make a complaint
Step 1: Raise a formal complaint with the agency, education provider or organisation (the agency) and wait for a response.
- Record a complaint reference number and the date you lodged your complaint.
- In most cases the agency will publish its complaint process online or advise you how to make a complaint in their decision notification.
- If you don’t receive a response within the agency’s published timeframe, you should contact them to follow up.
- the agency may ask you for more information to help it assess your complaint.
- We will not, and in some cases cannot, accept your complaint if you have not made a complaint to the agency first.
Step 2: If you are not satisfied with the way your complaint was handled or the outcome, you should discuss this with the agency first.
Step 3: If your issue remains unresolved, contact the Office.
How we can help
We can help to resolve your complaint by investigating the process if the agency, provider or organisation does not change their decision or give you a better explanation why they made it.
Sometimes we will help you to make a complaint to the agency, provider or organisation the complaint is about. If you are not satisfied with the result, you can come back to us with your complaint.
Sometimes we don’t have the power to assist. In this case we will refer you to the right complaint-handling body so they can help you.
How to make a complaint
You can contact us to make a complaint using our online complaint form, by telephone, in person, in writing or by fax.
If you are making the complaint on behalf of someone else, you will need to:
- make sure you have their permission to make the complaint
- complete our Permission for another person to act on my behalf form.
For more information see our contact us page.
How we make decisions
The Office receives a large volume of complaints from members of the public. However, we do not investigate every complaint we receive. The Ombudsman Act outlines a range of reasons that an investigation will not be undertaken, including that further action is not warranted.
Where issues are ‘systemic’ and affect a lot of people, our focus is on what we can do to improve things for as many people as possible, including into the future.
We think about how we can make a difference both at the individual and system level. Managing our complaints in this way means we can maximise our impact on improving the actions of government and the agencies that we oversee.
While we may not investigate every complaint, we still listen. Every complaint helps us understand the issues that the public are experiencing and help us to respond appropriately.
What does this mean for my complaint?
In some circumstances, the Officer may decide to close your complaint. They will do this because they have determined that further action is not warranted. This does not mean that the issue raised is not important.
Every complaint is assessed by a member of staff on its individual circumstances prior to a decision being made.
Sometimes the Officer will finalise a complaint because the Office is already taking action to look into the broader problem, or because an individual outcome is unlikely to be achieved. In making this decision the Officer consider a range of factors including the nature of the issue and/or internal policy guidance informing circumstances where further action is not warranted.
You can always expect us to listen so that we can understand your complaint and explain to you why we have made the decision.
There are a range of different tools that we use to resolve complaints. Complaints handling is just one of the ways that we can influence agencies to improve their practice. Read more about how we manage complaints.
You can find out more about the outcomes of our work by reading our case studies.
Read our reports and publications.