Interim Leadership After a Serious Incident or Media Attention

A practical guide for proprietors, boards and senior leaders

Something has gone seriously wrong. Perhaps a child has been badly hurt. Perhaps a safeguarding failure has come to light. Perhaps a journalist has called and you have until five o’clock to respond.

Many proprietors tell us that the first few days felt unreal, and that they made decisions in a state they’d not want to make decisions in again. It’s entirely understandable. A serious incident is a crisis for the people involved and a crisis for the leadership team at the same time, and the second one is rarely acknowledged.

This guide is about the first week and about where interim leadership fits, which is more often than boards expect and for different reasons than they assume.

What counts as a serious incident?

Anything where a child has come to significant harm, or where the school’s practice has failed in a way that puts children at risk.

In practice that includes a serious injury or death, a safeguarding failure that has come to light, an allegation against a member of staff that becomes public, a serious incident involving physical intervention or restraint, a child going missing, a criminal investigation, or a regulator taking enforcement action.

Media attention isn’t itself a serious incident, though it usually accompanies one. What it does is change the pace at which you have to operate, and it removes the option of working things out quietly.

The first week

Six things, roughly in this order.

Care for the people involved. The child and family first, then the staff directly involved, who will be distressed whatever the circumstances. This comes before reputation, before process, and before anything else on this list.

Make the immediate situation safe. Whatever gave rise to the incident, address it now rather than after the investigation. If a practice was unsafe, stop it today, whether that’s a behaviour and physical intervention arrangement or something in your premises.

Report it. Your duties will depend on what has happened and on your setting: children’s social care, the LADO, the police, Ofsted or the DfE, the ESFA, HSE, your insurers, your placing authorities. Take advice quickly on which apply and report promptly rather than perfectly.

Preserve everything. Records, CCTV, messages, logs, rotas, risk assessments. Nothing gets deleted, tidied, corrected or reorganised. This matters enormously and it’s the thing well meaning people get wrong under pressure.

Take advice. Legal, safeguarding, HR and communications. Before you make announcements, not after.

Name who is leading. In writing, with delegated authority. If your headteacher is directly involved or has been suspended, this cannot wait.

Where does interim leadership fit?

Three distinct situations, and they call for different things.

The head is directly involved or suspended. The straightforward case. You need someone leading the school, and internal cover is usually the wrong answer because your deputy may be a witness and will certainly have a view.

The head is not involved but cannot lead the response. A leader dealing with a serious incident is doing two jobs at once: running the school and handling the aftermath. Both are full time. An interim leader taking day to day operations while the head handles the investigation, the regulator and the family is often the arrangement that works best, and it’s the one boards consider least.

The board needs independent eyes. Where the incident raises questions about how the school has been run, an interim leader who wasn’t here when it happened can give the board an account that nobody who was here is able to give. Sometimes that’s paired with an independent review so the board has an evidenced picture rather than an impression.

Dealing with press attention

Take proper advice, and hold to a few principles.

Name one spokesperson and route everything through them. Tell staff not to comment, including on social media, and explain why rather than simply instructing.

Never comment on individual children, and be careful about anything that could identify one. In a special school with a small cohort, details that seem general can identify a child immediately.

Don’t say anything you can’t stand behind later. A statement that turns out to be inaccurate does far more damage than the original story, and it will be quoted back to you.

Consider your parent body before the press. Families should hear from you first, not from a news website. In a specialist setting, where families have often fought hard for the placement, that matters a great deal.

And be honest about what you can’t say. “There is an ongoing investigation and we are unable to comment on the detail, but here is what we have done” is a legitimate position and a far better one than speculation.

Holding staff together

This gets the least attention and it determines whether your school still functions in six months.

Staff will be frightened, some will feel blamed, and in a specialist setting many will be personally distressed about the child involved. Some will be worried about their own position. Others will be angry, at the leadership, at each other, or at the coverage.

Say what you can, honestly. Arrange proper support, including for staff who weren’t directly involved. Be visible. And don’t let the process become the only thing anyone talks about for three months, because that’s how a team disintegrates.

Expect resignations. Some people won’t want to work somewhere that’s been in the news, however unfairly. From our experience, staff turnover after a serious incident is the cost boards least anticipate.

What will regulators look at afterwards?

Less at the incident itself than at what you did about it.

They’ll want to know when you knew, what you did, who you told and when, whether you acted on advice, whether you addressed the underlying cause rather than the symptom, and whether children are safer now. They’ll look at your record of decisions, which is why the written log from day one matters so much.

They’ll also ask whether this could have been foreseen. Was there a pattern of low level concerns nobody joined up, and would a safeguarding audit have surfaced it? Had a risk been raised and not acted on? Those questions are answered by your records rather than by your account of them.

A school that can show it acted quickly, took advice, addressed the cause and can evidence all of it is in a far stronger position than one with a better outcome and no documentation.

From our experience

The thing that goes wrong most often isn’t the response to the incident. It’s the collapse of everything else while the incident consumes the leadership team.

Three months later the improvement plan hasn’t moved, monitoring has stopped, two staff have left, and the school has quietly declined in a way nobody noticed because everyone was looking at one thing. That’s the reason interim leadership after a serious incident is worth considering even when the head isn’t involved.

Many leaders tell us they don’t remember the first fortnight clearly. That’s a normal response to a crisis and it’s precisely why the written log and the external advice matter, because your judgement in that period isn’t what it usually is.

A common misconception

“Our priority now has to be protecting the school’s reputation.”

It’s an understandable instinct, particularly where a proprietor’s livelihood and a hundred children’s placements depend on the school continuing. But it’s the wrong first question and it usually produces the wrong answers.

The schools whose reputations survive a serious incident are the ones that put the child and family first, acted quickly, told the truth, addressed the cause and could evidence all of it. The ones that don’t survive are usually the ones that tried to manage the story before they’d managed the problem.

Doing the right thing properly is also, as it happens, the best reputational strategy available. But it works because it’s genuine, not because it’s a tactic.

Questions for proprietors and boards

• Have we told everyone we’re required to tell, and have we recorded when?
• Is every record preserved, and have staff been told explicitly not to amend anything?
• Is someone running the school while someone else handles the response, or is one person doing both?
• Have we addressed the underlying cause, or only the immediate incident?
• Who is supporting our staff, and does that include those not directly involved?

Our perspective

A serious incident is the hardest thing a school will go through, and how a board behaves in the first week shapes everything afterwards.

Look after the people involved first. Report properly and promptly. Preserve everything. Take advice before you speak. Make sure someone is running the school while someone else handles the aftermath, because one person cannot do both well.

Then address the cause honestly, even where that’s uncomfortable, and evidence what you did. Schools that recover well are the ones that used a terrible situation to become genuinely safer, which is the only thing that means anything to the children who were affected and to the ones still in your care.