Interim Headship Cover for Maternity Leave in a Special School

A practical guide for proprietors, boards and school leaders

Maternity cover is the one leadership absence you can genuinely plan for, and it’s remarkable how often schools don’t.

Many proprietors tell us they left it until the final half term because it felt awkward to be arranging cover while the headteacher was still very much in post and doing the job. It’s an understandable hesitation. It also means the school ends up appointing in a hurry for something it knew about for six months.

Done well, a maternity cover period can be genuinely good for a school. It brings fresh eyes, it develops internal leaders, and the head returns to a setting that has moved forward rather than one that held its breath.

When should you start planning maternity cover?

Six months out, and earlier is better.

That sounds excessive until you work backwards. Appointing an experienced interim headteacher takes four to eight weeks if you’re organised. Safer recruitment checks take time and can’t be shortened. And if you want an overlap before the leave starts, which you should, that has to be in the plan rather than hoped for.

Starting early also gives you the option of developing someone internally, which needs months rather than weeks. A deputy who’s going to step up benefits enormously from a term of preparation and coaching beforehand.

The one thing worth remembering is that maternity leave can start earlier than planned. Building a little slack into your timeline is sensible rather than pessimistic.

Should you appoint internally or bring someone in?

Both work, and the answer depends on what you have and what the school needs.

Internal cover works well where you have a deputy who’s genuinely ready or nearly ready, where the school is stable, and where you can properly resource the step up. It develops your own leader, it maintains continuity for pupils, and it’s usually cheaper.

The condition is that it must be properly resourced. A deputy covering headship while still doing their own job isn’t internal cover, it’s two jobs badly. Either backfill their substantive role or accept that some of it won’t happen and say so.

External cover works better where there’s no ready internal candidate, where the school has significant improvement or compliance work in progress, where an inspection is likely during the period, or where promoting a deputy would leave a second gap you can’t fill.

A hybrid is often strongest in specialist settings. An internal acting head running the school day to day, with an experienced interim above them a couple of days a week, gives you continuity for the children and capacity where it’s needed.

What does the interim need to know?

Maternity cover has a specific characteristic that changes how the role should be done: the substantive head is coming back.

That means the brief is different. This isn’t a turnaround placement and it isn’t a chance to reshape the school. The job is to keep it moving, deliver what was already planned, and hand it back in good condition.

The interim should know what’s already in train, what the head wants protected, what can be adjusted, and what should wait. A conversation between the outgoing head and the interim before the leave starts is worth more than any handover document, and it’s much easier to arrange while the head is still in post.

They also need to be told, plainly, that changes should be documented and explainable. A returning head who finds a restructured senior team and a rewritten behaviour policy will spend their first term undoing things, which serves nobody.

Keeping in touch

Agree this before the leave starts, and let the headteacher decide.

Some heads want a monthly update and the option of a keeping in touch day or two. Others want to be genuinely off, and that’s entirely their right. What causes problems is an unspoken assumption on either side, where a board thinks they’re being respectful by not contacting and the head feels shut out, or the reverse.

Keeping in touch days are optional and can’t be required. Where they’re used, they work best for something specific such as a board meeting or a handover conversation rather than a general catch up.

One thing worth saying to your interim: the absent head is not a resource to be phoned when something is difficult. If the arrangement only works because someone on maternity leave is answering questions, it isn’t working.

Planning the return

Plan the return at the same time as the cover, not four weeks before it happens.

Build in an overlap. Even a few days lets the returning head see the school running before they have to run it, and lets staff see the two leaders together, which settles a team faster than any announcement.

Expect the return to need care. A head coming back after a year returns to a school that has adapted, staff who have built a real relationship with someone else, and their own life substantially changed. Discussions about a phased return, changed hours or flexible working need to happen properly and with advice, and they need to happen before the return date rather than in the first week.

Ask the interim to write a short handover covering what changed and why, the state of safeguarding and the single central record, how people have developed, and what was deliberately left for the returning head to decide.

From our experience

The schools that handle this best treat it as a planned project rather than an absence to be survived. They start early, they resource it properly, and they use the period deliberately.

The most common difficulty is a deputy asked to step up with no additional pay, no reduction in their own workload and no support. It looks manageable for a term and then it isn’t. Many leaders tell us this was the period that made them look elsewhere, which is a poor outcome when the school was trying to develop them.

The second pattern is an interim making more change than the brief warranted. Usually well intentioned, and usually the result of nobody saying clearly that the head was coming back to a school she’d recognise. Schools that get this right say it explicitly at the point of appointment.

A common misconception

“We’ll manage for a year, it’s only maternity leave.”

A year is three terms. That’s longer than most interim placements, and considerably longer than a school can coast without noticing.

In a special school or alternative provision, a year without properly held leadership means a cohort of children who spend a significant part of their placement in a school that was managing rather than improving. They don’t get that time back, and it’s the reason maternity cover deserves the same seriousness as any other leadership appointment.

Questions for proprietors and leaders

• Have we started planning early enough, and have we built in slack?
• If a deputy is stepping up, what are they being paid and what has been taken off them?
• Has the interim been told clearly that the head is returning?
• Have we agreed keeping in touch arrangements with the head, on her terms?
• Is there an overlap planned at both ends?

Our perspective

Maternity leave is the leadership absence you can see coming, which makes it the one there’s least excuse for handling badly.

Start early, decide deliberately between internal and external cover, resource whichever you choose properly, brief the interim that this is cover rather than a mandate for change, and plan the return with the same care as the departure.

Get that right and the school gains from the period rather than merely surviving it, the head returns to something stronger than she left, and the children and young people in your school carry on getting the education they were promised throughout.