Writing a Headteacher Candidate Pack

A practical guide for proprietors, boards and trustees

The candidate pack is the only thing a prospective headteacher reads before deciding whether to apply. It’s frequently the least considered document in the whole process.

Many proprietors tell us theirs was assembled the week the advert went out, from the previous pack with the dates changed. Then they wondered why the applications were thin.

Strong candidates are usually in post somewhere and not desperate to move. What makes them apply is a pack that tells them something real about the school and the job.

What is a strong candidate actually reading for?

Not your ethos statement. Five things.

Can I do this job? They’re matching their experience against what the role actually requires, which means they need to know what it requires in specific terms.

Why is this vacancy open? The first thing every experienced leader wants to know, and the thing most packs avoid. Silence here reads as something to hide.

What state is the school in? Not the aspiration. The current position, including anything difficult.

What would I be walking into? Leadership team, staffing, finances, regulatory position, commissioner relationships.

Would I want to work for these people? Particularly with an owner led school, where the relationship with the proprietor will define the job. Candidates are reading the pack for clues about that.

A pack that answers those five honestly will attract fewer applications and better ones.

What should the pack include?

Eight sections, ten to fifteen pages.

A letter from the proprietor or chair. Personal, honest, and specific about why they’re recruiting and what they’re looking for. This is the section candidates read most closely.

The school as it is. Numbers, age range, needs profile, registration or approval position, staffing, structure. Facts rather than adjectives.

The current position. Latest inspection outcome, where you sit against it on inspection readiness, the improvement priorities, any regulatory matters. Include the uncomfortable parts.

The role. Job description and person specification, with the setting experience you actually require named specifically.

Governance and reporting. Who the head reports to, what the board or proprietor decides, what the head decides. Candidates for owner led schools particularly want this.

Terms. Salary or a genuine range, benefits, notice, start date. See below.

The process. Dates for closing, shortlisting and selection, what the selection process involves, and who is on the panel.

How to find out more. A named person to speak to informally, and an offer of a visit. Strong candidates almost always want a conversation first.

Put the salary in

Worth saying separately, because independent schools frequently leave it out.

“Competitive” tells a candidate nothing except that you might not be. Experienced leaders in specialist settings will not go through a two stage process to discover the figure doesn’t work.

A genuine range is fine. What isn’t fine is an omission that costs you candidates who’d have applied and a shortlist of people who then withdraw.

If the honest reason for omitting it is that the figure isn’t competitive, that’s a different problem and one worth addressing before you advertise rather than discovering at offer stage.

What should you leave out?

Four things make packs worse.

Generic ethos language. “We put children at the heart of everything we do.” Every school says it. It occupies space that could have carried information.

Stock photography. Use your own school or nothing. Candidates notice.

Overstatement. A pack describing a thriving school that the candidate discovers in week two is nothing of the kind will lose you a headteacher within a year, and the sector is small enough that the story travels.

The history of the school in five pages. Interesting to you, not to someone deciding whether to apply.

How the pack is used after application

A good pack keeps working after the closing date, and boards frequently forget this.

Shortlisted candidates will reread it before interview, so anything inaccurate in it will be raised. Panels use it as the reference point for what was promised. And the successful candidate will remember what they were told, which shapes the first six months of the relationship.

That’s another reason to write it honestly. A pack that oversells becomes a list of things the new head believes they were misled about, and rebuilding from there is slow.

It’s also worth sending the pack to your own senior team. They’ll spot anything that doesn’t describe the school they work in, and they’d rather know what candidates are being told than find out at interview.

The honesty question

This is where boards hesitate, and it’s the decision that most affects the quality of your field.

The instinct is to present the school at its best. It’s understandable and it’s counterproductive, for two reasons.

First, experienced leaders can tell. A pack for a school with a leadership vacancy that says nothing about why, and describes everything as strong, reads as evasive. The candidates you most want are the ones who’ll notice.

Second, the candidate you want is frequently attracted by the challenge. A leader who has taken two schools through improvement work is looking for a school that needs it. Hiding the challenge deters exactly the person who’d have thrived.

The version that works: here’s where we are, here’s what’s difficult, here’s what we’ve done about it, here’s what we need from the person who takes this on. That reads as a board that knows its own school, which is reassuring rather than alarming.

Where the situation is genuinely sensitive, a suspension or an ongoing investigation, take advice on wording rather than either concealing it or saying too much.

From our experience

The packs that produce the strongest fields are the honest ones, consistently.

We often see a board agonise over whether to mention a difficult inspection outcome, decide against it, and receive four weak applications. The candidates who’d have been interested by the challenge never knew there was one.

Many proprietors tell us the conversations that mattered most were the informal calls before application. Naming someone approachable and being genuinely available for those does more than any amount of design work on the document.

The other consistent finding is the salary. Packs without a figure produce fewer applications and more late withdrawals, and both cost you time you don’t have.

A common misconception

“If we’re honest about our challenges, nobody will apply.”

Fewer people will apply, and the ones who do will be the ones who could do the job.

An experienced headteacher is not looking for a school with no problems, because that school doesn’t exist and they know it. They’re looking for a board that understands its own position and will be straight with them, because that predicts what the working relationship will be like.

Concealing the challenge doesn’t recruit you a better head. It recruits you someone who resigns in eighteen months having discovered what they took on, and then you’re doing this again with a school in worse shape.

The children in your school need a leader who arrived knowing what they were taking on and chose it anyway.

Questions for boards and proprietors

• Does our pack say why the vacancy exists?
• Is the salary in it, or a genuine range?
• Would a candidate reading it recognise the school when they arrived?
• Have we named someone approachable for an informal conversation?
• Are we hiding a challenge that would actually attract the right person?

Our perspective

The candidate pack is a recruitment tool and an honesty test at the same time, and strong candidates read it as both.

Say why the vacancy exists. Describe the school as it is, including the difficult parts. Put the salary in. Name someone to call. Offer a visit. Leave out the stock language and the aspiration.

Do that and you’ll get a smaller, better field of people who understand what they’re applying for. That’s the position you want to be in when making an appointment that will shape the education of every child in your school for years.