Responsibility for investigating placement complaint

Short answer

In most cases the university (the higher education provider) is ultimately responsible for handling and investigating a placement complaint, even where the day-to-day problem arose with the placement organisation. You should normally be able to raise the complaint directly with your university rather than being sent off to use the placement provider’s own complaints procedure. This is the position set out by the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education (OIA) in its Good Practice Framework and its casework note on placements.

Why the university carries the main responsibility

The university is the body with the contractual and regulatory relationship with you as a student. It arranged or approved the placement, and it retains ultimate responsibility for decisions that affect your status as a student and your academic award. That means it cannot simply pass responsibility to the placement provider.

The OIA’s guidance makes several points that shape where responsibility sits:

You should be able to complain directly to the university about a service provided by another organisation, such as a placement provider, where you feel it has affected your learning experience. Students should not be expected to use the placement organisation’s own procedures to raise concerns about something the placement did or did not do that has affected their studies.

The university retains ultimate responsibility for any decision relating to your status as a student and to its academic awards. So if the placement problem affects your marks, your progression, your ability to meet learning outcomes, or whether you pass the placement module, that is squarely the university’s responsibility to investigate and decide.

The university cannot normally investigate the internal conduct of the placement organisation’s own employees, because it has no authority over them. What it can and must do is investigate whether the issues you raise affected your studies and whether it met its own obligations to you in the way it set up, supported and monitored the placement.

Where the placement provider comes in

The placement provider is not simply irrelevant. Its role depends on the nature of the complaint.

If your complaint is about a day-to-day matter or a service the placement organisation is directly responsible for providing, it is often proportionate for the placement organisation to resolve that aspect, sometimes through its own internal process. Where the placement provider has its own complaints procedure, the university may liaise with it and ask it to look into operational issues on the ground.

Good practice is for the university and placement provider to co-ordinate, ideally using a single route for gathering information and having information-sharing protocols in place, even where the ultimate decision-maker is different. In practice this often means the university leads, but draws on the placement provider’s investigation of what happened on site.

How this works in practice

The likely division is that the placement organisation investigates and responds on the operational facts of what happened during the placement, and the university investigates and decides on anything affecting your academic standing, learning outcomes, marks, progression or the adequacy of the support and arrangements it put in place. You should be able to route the whole matter through the university without having to run two separate complaints yourself.

What matters for your case

The right answer depends on some facts you have not yet given, so identify these before deciding how to proceed:

1. What is the complaint actually about. Is it about conduct, safety, treatment or supervision at the placement, or about how the university arranged, supported or assessed the placement, or about the effect on your marks or progression? The subject matter determines who realistically needs to investigate what.

2. Whether this is a standard degree placement, a work-based learning module, or an apprenticeship, as apprenticeships and some regulated professional placements can have additional or different routes.

3. What your university’s own placement and complaints policies say. These are binding on the university and will set out the exact procedure, deadlines and stages you must follow.

4. Whether the placement provider is a public body such as an NHS trust or school, which may have its own statutory or regulatory complaint routes for certain matters.

Practical next steps

1. Read your university’s student complaints procedure and any placement handbook or placement agreement. Note the time limits, which are often measured in weeks or months from the event.

2. Raise the complaint with the university first, in writing, setting out clearly what went wrong, when, what impact it had on your studies, and what outcome you want. Frame it as a complaint to the university, not to the placement provider, so responsibility is not deflected.

3. Keep evidence: emails, placement logs, supervision records, dates, names, and any assessment or feedback affected.

4. Ask the university expressly to co-ordinate with the placement provider where operational facts need checking, rather than telling you to complain separately to the provider.

5. Exhaust the university’s internal procedure to the final decision, and obtain a Completion of Procedures Letter.

6. If you remain dissatisfied after the internal process, you can normally ask the OIA to review how the university handled the matter, provided the university is a member of the scheme, which almost all are. The OIA cannot review the placement organisation itself unless it is a member, but it can review whether the university met its obligations to you in the placement arrangements.

Bottom line

Treat the university as the body responsible for handling your placement complaint, even where the underlying problem happened at the placement. Complain to the university first, ask it to investigate the effect on your studies and to co-ordinate with the placement provider on the operational facts, and keep the OIA in reserve if you are not satisfied at the end of the internal process.