AI-generated parental complaints surge, teachers report

Education leaders say a wave of AI-generated parental complaints is increasingly keeping teachers up at night. A Teacher Tapp survey found 61% of headteachers have noticed AI being used to draft complaints they’ve received, a figure education officials say reflects a growing trend rather than isolated incidents.

Families are generating letters up to 60 pages long, forcing teachers to spend hours reading them, with issues ranging from a cold lunch to a teacher taping a child's verruca during a PE lesson. Because AI can pull from a broad range of online information, many letters include case law from other countries and demand draconian punishments that bear little relevance to the incident. Some parents with lower literacy levels are believed to be using AI to produce documents that look more professional, though the resulting letters can be inaccurate or misapplied.

Louise Clements McLeod, a National Association of Head Teachers representative in Norfolk, described late-night correspondence as a strain on staff time. She said that a parent may email at six, seven or eight o’clock at night, and that people are not sleeping and worrying about it.

John Walker, partner at PHP law, said he has witnessed an exponential rise in AI-generated complaints since January 2024, with such letters now accounting for about a third of his cases. He noted that in many instances the legal action threatened by parents would be irrelevant to the facts of the matter.

Adam Jackson, a senior associate at Winckworth Sherwood Law, cautioned that many AI-generated texts quote case law from centuries ago or US statutes and misstate parents’ rights, creating disputes and delaying investigations. In one Norfolk case, a headteacher received a complaint about a student receiving a cold packed lunch rather than a warm meal, illustrating how even small incidents can be amplified by AI-generated narratives.

At Lakenham Primary School in Norwich, a teacher briefly taped a child’s verruca during a gym session to protect others. The next morning, headteacher Cassandra Williams received a four-page, harshly worded complaint from the child’s mother that outlined steps to be taken for human rights compliance.

In Kent, Daniel Cusani, deputy head of Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys, received a 60-page document generated by AI complaining about exams and citing material from the internet.

Context: Parentkind polling in the summer suggested parents filed more than 5 million formal complaints about their child’s school during the previous year. In July, Sir Anthony Seldon warned that many teacher friends in the state sector had noticed a rise in vexatious complaints that suck time from an already stretched system. A Department for Education spokesperson said the department wants parents, schools and government to be partners in improving outcomes, and noted that the right to complain is an important principle of the system. It added that it is seeking ways to make the process more robust and to resolve issues earlier in the best interests of children.