Public services make decisions that can change your family’s life. You deserve to be listened to, treated fairly and given honest explanations.
But if you feel those things have not happened, getting someone to listen can become another struggle.
You explain yourself. You challenge a report. You make a complaint. You wait for a response, then another investigation, then another decision about whether anyone can look at what happened.
At the end of it, you may still feel that nobody has properly heard you.
We built Public Trust because the people who use public services deserve a public voice in how those services are judged.
When the complaints process leaves you feeling shut out
Complaining to the organisation you believe has let you down can feel like asking it to mark its own homework.
In England’s statutory children’s complaints procedure, stage two includes independent oversight and stage three involves an independent panel. Those safeguards matter. But their existence does not automatically mean every family feels heard, trusts the process or believes its concerns have been answered.
Taking things further does not always bring the fresh examination you hoped for. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman explains that, following that procedure, it normally looks at how the council investigated the complaint rather than investigating the original issues again. Where the process was flawed, it may ask the council to repeat the relevant stages. Read the Ombudsman’s explanation.
Social Work England has a different, limited role: it considers a registered social worker’s fitness to practise. It cannot overturn a council’s or court’s decision, investigate the service as a whole or provide many of the remedies a family may be seeking. Read what Social Work England can consider.
These routes have purposes and powers of their own. Yet you can follow them and still be left asking: where does my experience actually count?
Public Trust creates another place for it to count. You do not need a complaint to have been upheld before you can rate your own experience.
A public track record, built by the people affected
The ambition is straightforward: each council service should have a visible public track record shaped by the experiences of the people who dealt with it.
Think of the accountability behind a credit score: a record that people can consult, compare and take seriously. Here, the score reflects reported experiences of a public service.
It should help people see recurring concerns, recognise good treatment and ask informed questions about how a service operates.
Positive experiences belong here. Negative experiences belong here. Both must be treated by the same rules.
A score needs to change as new experiences are reported, ratings are withdrawn or errors are corrected. Our commitment is to apply the rules consistently and explain how the results are calculated.
A council’s public statement cannot speak for every family. An inspection cannot describe every interaction. On Public Trust, the official inspection and what families report appear alongside each other, clearly identified.
A favourable headline should not make difficult experiences invisible. Equally, good work deserves recognition from the people it helped.
Questions about the things that matter
We ask specific questions about how the service treated you.
Our children’s services questionnaire for England draws on Social Work England’s published professional standards, national guidance and findings from inspections and complaints. It covers issues including honesty, accurate records, fair treatment, involvement in decisions and how concerns were handled.
These are expectations that people should be able to recognise in their own dealings with a service.
Were you listened to? Did records reflect what happened? Were decisions explained? When you raised a concern, was it taken seriously?
The questions are our own. They are not endorsed by a regulator, and your answers do not establish that a professional standard or law was breached. They make your experience part of a wider picture that other people can see.
Making experiences visible while protecting privacy
For families involved in court proceedings, speaking publicly can feel particularly difficult. You may want people to understand how you were treated while knowing that sharing details could identify your child or breach restrictions.
Public Trust uses structured questions instead of public stories. There are no comment boxes or document uploads. Your email address and individual answers are not displayed publicly, and any worker named privately is not publicly rated.
The purpose is to bring experiences together without putting a family’s case on show.
This does not override court orders or reporting restrictions. If proceedings or an order affect what you can share, check with your legal adviser before contributing. We cannot promise protection from contempt of court simply because an answer is structured or a name is withheld. Read the official guidance on family-court reporting.
Fairness is what gives the ratings weight
Every rating is checked against our rules before it counts. That check does not independently prove everything that happened.
People must rate their own direct experience. Negative ratings are not excluded simply for being negative, and a council’s disagreement is not, by itself, a reason to remove one.
While a service has only a few ratings, its overall score is steadied towards the middle. That reduces the influence of a very small number of responses. We explain this openly, and show the number of ratings behind the result.
The scores describe what contributors reported. They are not official findings about a council or an individual worker, and submitting a rating does not submit a formal complaint.
For public accountability to mean anything, the results must be fair enough to take seriously—even when someone dislikes what they show.
Built to be found and shared
Public accountability needs visibility.
The people developing Public Trust bring years of experience in web design and development. Our aim is for people searching for a council’s children’s services to find families’ experiences alongside the council’s own website and official reports.
We want those ratings to be easy to discover, understand and share. We also want star ratings to appear in search results where eligible, although Google decides what appears and does not guarantee them. Google’s guidance explains this.
Council pages are built for sharing, with previews designed to include their published score. Some platforms may retain an older preview; the council’s page is the place to check the latest figure.
Sharing a council’s page does not publish your individual rating. It helps other people find the results and gives those with direct experience an opportunity to contribute.
Independent, and starting with children’s services
Public Trust is not run by, funded by or connected to any council, government department, NHS body, regulator or inspectorate. There are no adverts. The site is self-funded, with voluntary support helping to keep it running.
Supporting us never changes a score or determines which ratings are accepted.
We are starting with council children’s services in England and Wales. As the site develops, we aim to include other public services, including adult social care and support for children with special educational needs.
The principle will remain the same: the people affected deserve a say.
Help build the public picture
If you have direct experience of your council’s children’s services, find its page and rate how you were treated.
Share the page with other people who have used the service. Encourage honest contributions, whether their experiences were positive, negative or mixed.
If you can, buying us a coffee helps with the costs of keeping Public Trust available and checking ratings.
You may have felt that your concerns went nowhere. You may have been left with answers that did not address what mattered to you.
Your experience still matters. Public Trust exists to help make it count.
If a child is in immediate danger, call 999. Otherwise, contact the children’s social care team at the child’s local council. For advice, the NSPCC helpline is 0808 800 5000.