Admissions and Placements During a Headteacher Vacancy

A practical guide for proprietors, boards and senior leaders in independent special schools and alternative provision

Referrals don’t pause because your headteacher has left. If anything they arrive faster, because a local authority with a child who needs a place this term is working to their timetable rather than yours.

It’s understandable that this feels like the wrong moment to be taking decisions about admissions. Many proprietors tell us they took placements during a vacancy that they’d have thought twice about with a settled leadership team, and one or two of those placements went on to be the hardest thing about the following year.

The opposite mistake is just as costly. A school that stops accepting referrals for two terms can find the commissioning relationships it spent years building have quietly moved elsewhere.

Who can accept a placement when there is no headteacher?

Somebody must be named, in writing, with the authority to say yes and, more importantly, to say no.

That’s usually the acting or interim head, sometimes with a threshold above which the proprietor decides. What doesn’t work is admissions decisions being made by whoever picked up the phone, which is what happens by default when nobody has settled it.

Write down who can accept a standard referral, what makes a referral non standard, and who decides on those. A useful line is that anything involving significantly higher need than your usual cohort, an unusual funding arrangement, or a child whose previous placement broke down suddenly should go a level up during a vacancy.

The person deciding also needs the information to decide with. If your acting head can’t see the current staffing picture, the class group profiles and the existing risk assessments, they aren’t making an admissions decision, they’re guessing.

Check your registration limits first

This is the one that catches independent schools out, and it catches them out most during periods of change.

Your registration sets out what you’re approved for: pupil numbers, age range, sex of pupils, and whether you’re approved to admit pupils with EHCPs and for which types of need. Admitting outside those limits is a material change requiring approval, not something to sort out afterwards.

During a vacancy this is exactly the kind of detail that gets missed, because the person who held it in their head has gone. Anyone making admissions decisions needs to have your registered limits in front of them, and needs to know that a request to take a fourteen year old when you’re registered from eleven to sixteen is fine, and a request to take one when you’re registered eleven to fourteen is not.

If you’re close to your numbers limit, know exactly where you are before you accept anything.

Assessing a referral when leadership is thin

The questions are the same as always. What’s different is that you have less capacity to absorb a placement that turns out harder than expected.

Look honestly at what the child needs and whether you can meet it now, with the staff you currently have, rather than with the team you had last term or expect to have next. A vacancy period often coincides with staff turnover, and a placement judged against your full establishment can look very different when two experienced staff have left.

Look at the class or group you’d be placing them into, and at what your provision can realistically deliver right now. Adding a child with high need to a group that’s already stretched affects every other child in it, and those children are already living through a leadership change.

Read the paperwork properly, including the parts about why the last placement ended. Where information is thin, ask. A local authority under pressure will sometimes send a referral with gaps, and filling those gaps is your job rather than an imposition.

When should you say no?

Saying no during a vacancy is not a failure of nerve. It’s often the most professional thing available.

Decline where the need is outside what you’re registered for or genuinely equipped to meet. Decline where you’d be placing a child into a group that can’t absorb it safely. Decline where the information is too incomplete to make a proper judgement and the authority won’t supply more. Decline where accepting would take you over a registration limit.

How you decline matters as much as the decision, and it is worth handling with the same care you would give any commissioning conversation. Explain your reasoning, be specific about what you could take, and offer to revisit once leadership is settled. Commissioners respect a school that turns down a placement it can’t do well far more than one that accepts everything and then ends a placement in November.

Talking to placing authorities during a vacancy

Tell them, early, yourself.

Placing authorities watch leadership stability closely, and hearing about your vacancy from a parent or a social worker is considerably worse than hearing it from you. A short call saying the head has left, this named person is leading the school, and here’s who to contact about placements will do more for your commissioning relationships than anything else you do that month.

Be honest about capacity. If you’re being more cautious about referrals this term, say so and explain why. From our experience, commissioners find that reassuring rather than alarming, because it tells them you know your own limits.

Keep the contact going through the vacancy rather than making one call and going quiet. A monthly update to your main authorities costs very little.

Existing placements need attention too

It’s easy to focus entirely on new referrals and take the current roll for granted.

Annual reviews still have dates attached and still need doing properly. Reports to commissioners still need to go out. Any placement that’s wobbling needs more attention during a vacancy, not less, because a placement that breaks down while you have no head will be remembered.

Where a child’s needs have changed and your provision may no longer be right, that conversation should happen with the authority rather than being deferred until leadership settles. Deferring it rarely helps the child.

From our experience

The mistake we see most often is a school taking a placement it shouldn’t have, because saying yes felt like the safer commercial decision at an uncertain moment.

It almost never is. A placement that breaks down costs you the income anyway, plus the commissioner’s confidence, plus a difficult period for the child and for the staff who were trying to make it work.

The opposite pattern is a school that quietly stops responding to referrals for two terms because nobody has authority to decide. Many leaders tell us they only realised the damage when referrals didn’t resume afterwards. Commissioners don’t announce that they’ve stopped calling.

Schools that manage this well name the decision maker in week one, tell their authorities immediately, and keep answering the phone.

A common misconception

“We should pause admissions until we have a permanent head.”

It’s an understandable instinct and it’s usually an overcorrection. A two term pause can undo commissioning relationships that took years to build, and those don’t come back on their own.

What’s actually needed is a clear decision maker, honest assessment against current capacity, and a willingness to decline the placements you genuinely can’t do well. That protects the children already in your school, protects the child being referred, and keeps you in the conversation with the authorities you’ll need next year.

Questions for proprietors and boards

• Who can accept a placement today, and is it written down?
• Does that person have our registered limits in front of them?
• What makes a referral non standard during this period, and who decides on those?
• Have we spoken to our main placing authorities ourselves?
• Are our annual reviews and commissioner reports still going out on time?

Our perspective

Admissions during a vacancy is a governance question as much as an operational one. It’s about who decides, on what basis, and with what information.

Settle that in the first week and the rest follows. You’ll take the placements you can do well, decline the ones you can’t with a proper explanation, and keep your commissioners informed throughout.

That protects the children already in your school, who are living through enough change already, and it protects the ones being referred, who deserve a placement made on a proper judgement rather than a decision taken by whoever happened to answer the phone.