Interim Leadership During DfE Enforcement Action in Independent Schools

A practical guide for proprietors of registered independent schools

An inspection has found unmet standards. Correspondence has arrived. There’s an action plan to submit, a deadline attached, and possibly a restriction on admitting new pupils.

Many proprietors tell us the hardest part was the pace. Regulatory processes move faster than school improvement does, and a school under enforcement is being asked to demonstrate change on a timescale that doesn’t match how change actually happens.

This guide is about where leadership sits in that response, and why it’s usually the first thing a proprietor should look at rather than the last.

Why does leadership sit at the centre of the regulatory response?

Because the Independent School Standards place duties on the proprietor to ensure the school is effectively led and managed, and that leaders fulfil their responsibilities so that all the standards are consistently met.

That means leadership isn’t one standard among many. It’s the standard that explains whether the others will be met next term as well as this one.

Practically, a regulator looking at a school with unmet standards is asking two questions. Has the specific failing been fixed? And is there leadership capable of making sure it stays fixed and that similar things don’t happen elsewhere?

A school can answer the first and fail on the second. Fixing a fire safety issue or updating a policy set is achievable in weeks. Demonstrating that the school now has leadership that would have caught it is a different exercise.

What can an interim leader do that an existing leader often cannot?

Four things, and they’re specific rather than general.

Give you an honest baseline. A leader who was in post when the standards were found unmet is, understandably, invested in an account of why. Someone arriving fresh can tell the proprietor what’s actually there, including the things nobody has said out loud.

Work at regulatory pace. Responding to enforcement is a substantial piece of work with hard deadlines, running alongside the whole of the ordinary job. Schools that try to absorb it into an existing stretched leadership team usually miss something.

Bring the experience of having done it. An interim leader who has taken a school through enforcement before knows what a credible action plan looks like, what a regulator will want to see on a return visit, and which of the twenty things on your list actually matter.

Demonstrate that you acted. This is the one proprietors underestimate. A board that appointed experienced leadership promptly has evidenced a serious response. A board that submitted a plan and changed nothing about capacity has not.

What should you look for in these circumstances?

Not general headship credentials. Three specific things.

Experience of regulatory processes. Someone who has responded to unmet standards, been through a progress monitoring visit, or taken a school out of enforcement. This is a distinct skill.

Knowledge of your setting type. An independent special school, a residential setting and an AP each have different standards profiles. A leader who doesn’t know yours will spend their first month learning it and you don’t have a month.

Willingness to be blunt with you. A large part of the value here is someone telling a proprietor things they’d rather not hear about the school and, sometimes, about their own oversight. A leader who wants to be liked will give you a comfortable term and a return visit that goes badly.

Writing an action plan that holds up

The plans that fail are the ones that describe intentions.

Every action needs a date, a named person and a way of knowing whether it worked. “Strengthen safeguarding practice” is not an action. “Independent safeguarding audit completed by 14 February, findings actioned by 31 March, re-audit in the summer term” is.

Address the cause as well as the finding. A regulator who sees a plan fixing five specific issues and nothing about why five issues arose will conclude that a sixth is coming.

Be realistic about timescales. A plan promising more than you can deliver produces a worse position at the return visit than an honest plan that’s fully delivered.

And include external validation. A proprietor saying the standards are now met carries limited weight. An independent review or a targeted safeguarding audit confirming it carries considerably more, and gives you evidence rather than assertion.

Where a restriction on admissions applies

This is the enforcement measure with the most immediate practical consequence, because it stops income while costs continue.

Two things follow.

The financial clock is now running. Model honestly how long the school can operate under the restriction. That’s not defeatism, it’s the information you need to decide how hard to push and how quickly. A proprietor who doesn’t know this is making decisions blind.

Commissioner confidence is the second casualty. Authorities that can’t place with you will place elsewhere, and those relationships don’t automatically return when the restriction lifts. Keep talking to them throughout, honestly, about what you’re doing.

Take proper advice on the terms of the restriction itself and on the route to having it lifted. Getting that process right is specialist work and it’s not the moment to improvise.

Don’t let the rest of the school slip

Enforcement absorbs leadership attention completely, and the school carries on regardless.

Teaching continues. Safeguarding continues. The children are still there every day, and many of them are in a specialist setting because previous provision didn’t work for them.

This is a strong argument for separating the roles during the period. Someone runs the school. Someone else drives the regulatory response and the relationship with the regulator. One person attempting both will do neither well, and the part that suffers is the part with children in it.

From our experience

The schools that come out of enforcement well are the ones that treated the leadership finding as seriously as the specific unmet standards.

We often see a proprietor fix five discrete issues efficiently and change nothing about capacity or oversight. The return visit finds the original issues resolved and the leadership question unanswered, and the school is back where it started.

Many proprietors tell us the most useful thing an interim did was tell them, in week two, something the previous leadership had been unable to say. That honest baseline is what makes an action plan credible rather than aspirational.

The other pattern worth naming is evidence. Schools assemble it retrospectively in the fortnight before a return visit, which is far harder and less convincing than maintaining a running file from day one.

A common misconception

“We need to fix the specific standards that were unmet.”

You do, and it isn’t sufficient on its own.

A regulator that has found unmet standards is asking why they were unmet and whether the school would notice next time. Fixing the specific items without addressing the leadership and oversight that allowed them tells a returning inspector that the school is compliant today and no more secure than it was.

It’s understandable that boards focus on the list, because the list is concrete and the leadership question feels vague. But the leadership question is the one that determines whether you’re back here in eighteen months.

The children in your school need a setting that catches things itself rather than one that fixes what it’s told to fix. That’s what a serious response looks like.

Questions for proprietors and boards

• Do we have an honest external baseline, or our own account of what went wrong?
• Does our action plan address why this happened, not just what happened?
• Have we added real leadership capacity, or asked the same people to work harder?
• Can we evidence impact, or only activity?
• If there’s a restriction on admissions, how long can we operate under it?

Our perspective

Enforcement is a difficult period and schools come through it regularly. What separates the ones that recover from the ones that don’t is rarely the severity of the original finding.

Get an honest baseline early. Add genuine capacity rather than asking existing leaders to do more. Write a plan with dates, names and measures, and address the cause as well as the symptom. Get external validation before anyone returns. Keep talking to your commissioners. And make sure somebody is still running the school while all of this happens.

Do that and a school can come out of enforcement genuinely stronger than it went in, which is the outcome the children and young people in it deserve from a difficult year.