Interim Headteacher or Consultant: Which Does Your School Need?

A practical guide for proprietors, boards and trustees weighing up leadership support

Boards often come to us knowing something needs to change and genuinely unsure what to ask for. Do we need someone to run the school, or someone to help the person already running it?

It’s a good question, and getting it wrong is expensive in both directions. Appointing an interim when the school has a capable head who simply needs support can undermine a leader who was doing fine. Bringing in a consultant when there’s nobody holding headship leaves the gap exactly where it was, with a report on top of it.

Many leaders tell us they only worked out the difference after commissioning the wrong one. This guide should save you that.

What is the difference between an interim headteacher and a consultant?

The difference is accountability.

An interim headteacher holds the role. They’re in post, they make decisions, they line manage staff, they lead safeguarding, and they answer for what happens.

A consultant or school improvement partner advises the person who holds the role. They bring expertise, they challenge, they support, and they leave the accountability exactly where it was.

Everything else follows from that. An interim is usually more days, more cost and more disruption, because they’re doing a job rather than supporting one. A consultant is lighter touch, cheaper and less visible, because they’re strengthening something that already exists.

When is a consultant the right choice?

A consultant is usually right when you have a leader in post who’s capable but stretched, isolated or working outside their experience.

That covers more situations than boards assume:

• A new or first time head who’s doing well but has never taken a school through inspection or registration. Coaching and early leadership support is usually a better answer than replacing them.
• A specific piece of work that needs expertise the school doesn’t hold, such as a safeguarding audit, a curriculum review or preparing for registration.
• A board that wants an honest picture of where the school stands. An independent review gives you that in a fortnight without changing anything about who leads.
• An improvement plan that has stalled but where the leadership is sound and the issue is capacity or method rather than capability.
• A proprietor who has lost confidence but isn’t sure whether that judgement is fair. A review is a far better first step than a leadership change.

In each of these, the leader stays in post and gets stronger. That’s usually better for staff and much better for the children, who don’t experience a change at the top at all.

When is an interim the right choice?

An interim is right when the role itself isn’t being held, or can’t be held to the standard the school needs.

• The headteacher has left, resigned or is absent and there’s no credible internal cover.
• A leader is suspended or the subject of an investigation, and someone independent needs to lead the school meanwhile.
• The school is under regulatory pressure and needs leadership capacity that simply isn’t there.
• A capable deputy is covering headship and visibly cannot sustain two jobs.
• Decisions are needed that the current leadership can’t make, usually because they involve the people or arrangements around them.

The last one is worth sitting with. Sometimes the reason a school hasn’t moved isn’t a lack of advice. It’s that the necessary decisions are ones the incumbent can’t take, because they appointed the person, or they built the system, or they’d still be there afterwards.

A simple test

Ask one question: if this person doesn’t come, who makes the decisions?

If the answer is a name, and that person can genuinely make them, you probably need a consultant. Advice and challenge will help them make better decisions.

If the answer is nobody, or a name followed by a hesitation, you need an interim. No amount of advice fills an empty chair.

A second test helps where the first is unclear. Ask whether the problem is that the school doesn’t know what to do, or that it can’t do it. Not knowing is a consultancy problem. Not being able to is a capacity problem, and capacity means a person in post.

When do you need both?

More often than you’d think, and the combination is often the strongest option.

An interim holds the school and makes the decisions. A consultant works alongside on a defined piece of specialist work, such as a compliance review or preparing for inspection, so the interim isn’t trying to do everything themselves in a setting they’ve only just arrived in.

The other common pairing runs the other way. A board commissions an independent review first, uses it to work out what’s actually wrong, and only then decides whether an interim is needed and what to brief them on. That order costs a fortnight and saves a term.

What does each cost?

Consultancy is usually bought in days or as a defined piece of work, so the cost is bounded and visible from the start. Interim leadership is a day rate over a term or more, so it’s a larger commitment.

The comparison that matters isn’t the two invoices, though. It’s what each is capable of fixing. A cheap consultancy engagement that leaves the real gap untouched isn’t good value, and neither is an interim placement for a school whose leader was doing fine and needed six days of support.

From our experience

The most common mistake we see is a board buying a report when it needed a person. A school under pressure commissions a review, receives a fair and accurate document, and then discovers there’s nobody with the time to act on any of it. Six months later the same board appoints an interim, having lost two terms.

The opposite happens too, though less often. A board appoints an interim head over a competent deputy who was managing perfectly well and simply needed someone to talk to. That deputy usually leaves within the year.

Many leaders tell us the honest conversation they wished someone had started earlier was about capacity rather than capability. They weren’t failing. There was just more work than one person could hold, and nobody had said so out loud.

A common misconception

“A consultant is the cheaper version of an interim.”

It’s understandable that boards see it as a scale, with consultancy at one end and interim leadership at the other. They aren’t on the same scale at all. One provides advice, the other provides accountability, and buying advice when you needed accountability doesn’t save money. It postpones the decision while the school carries on without a leader.

The children in the school need someone making decisions on their behalf every day. That’s the question worth answering first.

Questions for boards and proprietors

• If we don’t commission anything, who makes the decisions this school needs in the next term?
• Is this a knowing problem or a doing problem?
• Can the person currently in post make the decisions that are actually required?
• Do we know enough about our own school to brief anyone properly yet?
• What do we want to be true here in two terms, and which option gets us there?

Our perspective

Neither option is better than the other. They answer different questions, and the boards who commission well are the ones who worked out which question they were asking before they picked up the phone.

If you’re genuinely unsure, start with an independent review. It’s the smallest commitment available, it tells you which of the two you need, and it means whoever arrives next starts with an accurate picture rather than assembling one while the term runs on without them.