Interim Headteacher Job Description: What to Include

A practical guide for proprietors, boards and trustees

Boards appointing an interim headteacher frequently produce one of two things. Either the permanent headship job description with “interim” written at the top, or nothing at all beyond a phone conversation.

Neither works. Many proprietors tell us the placement drifted because nobody had written down what the person was actually for, and the permanent job description they’d reached for described a job that didn’t apply.

An interim appointment needs two documents, and understanding why makes both easier to write.

Job description or brief? You need both

They do different jobs and keeping them separate is what makes the arrangement flexible.

The job description says what the role is: scope, accountabilities, authority, reporting lines, safeguarding position. It’s stable for the length of the placement and it’s what you’d advertise or send to a provider.

The brief says what this particular placement must achieve: three or four objectives, the current position, what needs stabilising. It changes at review points, and it should.

Merging them causes a specific problem. The objectives get embedded in the job description, and then adjusting them after week six, which is exactly what you’ll want to do once the interim has seen the school, means renegotiating the whole document.

What should the job description include?

Eight things, and it should run to two pages rather than six.

The title and the scope. Interim headteacher, interim executive headteacher, interim head of school. Say which and say what it covers, particularly in a group where the boundary matters.

Duration and pattern. Expected start, expected end, days per week and which days if it matters. An acknowledgement that the end date may move.

Reporting line. One named person. Not the board collectively and not two people.

Delegated authority, in figures. What can be decided alone: spending limits, staffing decisions, contracts, changes to provision, communication with commissioners and parents. This is the section most often omitted and it stalls schools within a fortnight when it’s missing.

Safeguarding. Whether the interim holds the designated safeguarding lead role or line manages the person who does. If they hold it, say what training is required. Ambiguity here is the most consequential kind.

Core accountabilities. Safeguarding and welfare, quality of education and SEND provision, staff leadership, compliance and regulation, commissioning relationships, finance within the delegated limits. Kept high level.

Handover expectations. A written handover, a safeguarding handover, and availability for a small number of calls afterwards. Naming this at the start means it happens.

Review points. Dates, in the document, not just in conversation.

What should you leave out?

Four things belong in a permanent headship document and not here.

Long term strategy. Vision, three year planning, curriculum redesign. Not the interim’s job, and anything they produce will be quietly abandoned by the permanent head.

Everything the previous head did. A job description assembled by listing the outgoing head’s tasks encodes their particular arrangement, including the parts that weren’t working. Design the role, don’t inherit it.

The specific objectives. Those go in the brief, so they can be adjusted at a review point without touching the contract.

Anything you won’t actually delegate. An accountability without the authority to deliver it is a set up, and experienced interims will spot it.

Where the honesty question sits

An interim job description has to be honest about the situation in a way a permanent one sometimes isn’t.

Say why the vacancy exists. If the previous head left after a difficult period, or the school has unmet standards, or there’s an investigation running, the interim needs to know before they accept rather than discovering it in week two from a member of staff.

Experienced interim leaders aren’t deterred by difficulty. It’s the work. What deters them, rightly, is a board that wasn’t straight at the outset, because it predicts how the rest of the placement will go.

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

Advertising it

Most interim roles aren’t advertised, and where you’re going through a provider the job description is what you send them.

Be specific about setting type in the requirements. Not “experience of SEND”. “Substantive leadership of a residential independent special school” or “experience of leading an AP through registration”. The pool is small and specific, and a vague requirement produces candidates who can’t do this particular job.

Say what you need experience of beyond the setting: regulatory recovery, a difficult departure, a restructure, whatever this placement actually involves.

And state the terms. Day rate or a range, days per week, expected duration. Interim leaders will not go through a process to discover the figure doesn’t work.

Who writes it?

Usually the proprietor or chair, and it’s worth thinking about who else should see it before it goes out.

Your senior team should. They’ll be working to this person and they need to know what the interim is authorised to decide. A senior team that doesn’t know the boundary will either escalate everything or nothing.

Where you’re using a provider, send them the draft and ask whether it’s realistic. A good provider will tell you if the days don’t match the accountabilities, or if the authority is too narrow for the objectives you’ve set. That’s a useful free check.

And if you have an outgoing head who’s leaving on reasonable terms, ask them what the role actually involves. They know which parts of it consume the week, and that’s frequently different from what a job description would suggest.

Reviewing it

The job description shouldn’t need changing during a placement. The brief will.

At your six week review, expect the interim to tell you that one of your objectives was based on an incomplete picture. That’s not a failure of the brief, it’s what the first six weeks are for. Adjust the brief, leave the job description alone, and record the change.

Where the job description does need changing, usually because the days or the scope have shifted, treat that as a contract variation rather than an informal understanding. Placements that drift into different arrangements without documentation are the ones that end in disagreement.

From our experience

The section that’s missing most often is delegated authority, and it’s the one that determines whether the placement functions.

We regularly see an interim spend their first fortnight unable to make routine decisions because nobody had said whether they could, while the board assumed things were moving. Both sides behaved reasonably and nothing happened.

Many proprietors tell us they hadn’t thought to write it down because they’d have said yes to anything sensible. That’s exactly the problem: the interim doesn’t know that, and asking every time is slower than the school can afford.

The other frequent gap is the safeguarding position. Where a departing head held the designated safeguarding lead role and the document doesn’t say who holds it now, that’s an immediate risk rather than an administrative oversight.

A common misconception

“It’s a temporary appointment, so a job description is over-formalising it.”

An interim headteacher carries the same statutory responsibilities as a substantive one from their first morning. They lead safeguarding, they make decisions with consequences, they line manage staff, they commit the school to things.

Being temporary doesn’t reduce any of that. If anything it increases the need for clarity, because they have no accumulated understanding of how this school does things and no time to acquire it by osmosis.

Two pages takes an hour to write, and it’s the difference between a placement that moves and one that spends six weeks establishing what the person is allowed to do. The children in your school don’t have those six weeks spare.

Questions for proprietors and boards

• Do we have both a job description and a separate brief?
• Does the document say, in figures, what the interim can decide alone?
• Is the designated safeguarding lead position stated explicitly?
• Have we been honest in it about why the vacancy exists?
• Have we named the specific setting experience we require, rather than SEND generally?

Our perspective

An interim job description is a short, practical document and it does more work than boards expect.

Keep it separate from the brief so the objectives can flex. State the authority in figures. Be explicit about safeguarding. Be honest about the situation. Name the setting experience you actually need. Put the handover expectation in from the start.

Written properly it takes an hour and it gives your interim what they need to start leading on day one rather than in week three, which is what the school and the children in it are paying for.