Interim Leadership During an Ofsted Monitoring Inspection

A practical guide for boards, proprietors and interim leaders

A monitoring inspection lands differently when the person leading the school arrived eight weeks ago. The board is anxious, the staff are tired, and the obvious question hangs over everything: can a temporary leader convince inspectors that this school is improving?

Many interim leaders tell us the pressure they felt was less about the inspection itself and more about being judged on a period they weren’t there for. It’s understandable, and it’s largely misplaced. Monitoring inspections are about direction of travel, and an interim is well placed to evidence that.

What does a monitoring inspection look at?

Whether the school is improving in the areas that were identified as needing it.

Under the renewed framework, evaluation areas are graded on a five point scale from exceptional through strong standard, expected standard and needs attention to urgent improvement, with safeguarding graded separately as met or not met. Where a school has been graded at the lower end in one or more areas, monitoring is how progress gets checked between full inspections.

The focus is narrower than a full inspection. Inspectors will concentrate on the areas of concern rather than re-inspecting everything, and they’ll want to see whether the actions taken are having an effect rather than whether a plan exists.

Safeguarding will be looked at whatever the focus, because it always is.

The leadership capacity question

This is the question boards worry about most and it’s a fair one for inspectors to ask.

Leadership capacity means whether the school has the leadership it needs to make and sustain the improvement required. A school with an interim head has a legitimate question attached to that: what happens when they leave?

The answer that works isn’t “the interim is very good”. It’s evidence that the improvement is being built into the school rather than held by one person.

Practically, that means being able to show three things. What’s changed since the last inspection, with evidence. Who is doing that work, including people other than the interim. And what the plan is for permanent leadership, with a timeline.

A board that can say “we appointed an interim in September with this brief, here’s what has changed, we’ve appointed a permanent head to start in January, and here’s the handover plan” is in a strong position. A board that says the interim arrangement is under review is not.

What will inspectors want from the interim?

Four things.

An accurate account of where the school is. Not optimistic. Accurate. An interim who says the school has transformed in eight weeks will not be believed, and shouldn’t be.

Evidence of impact rather than activity. “We’ve delivered three training sessions” is activity. “Here’s what changed in practice as a result, and here’s how we know” is impact. Under a framework that starts from defined criteria, the second is what counts.

Honesty about what hasn’t moved. There will be things you haven’t got to. Saying so, with a reason and a timescale, is far stronger than a claim inspectors will test and disprove.

A clear view of what happens next. Including after you leave. An interim who can articulate how the improvement will be sustained without them has understood the job.

Say who you are and when you started, early, as you would on a planning call. Then own the school as it is rather than distancing yourself from what you inherited.

Preparing without exhausting the staff

A staff team in a school under monitoring has usually been through a difficult period already, and wellbeing matters here as much as evidence, possibly including a leadership departure. The instinct to prepare intensively will do more harm than good.

Three principles help.

Prepare the evidence, not the performance. Inspectors want to see what typically happens. A week of unusual activity is visible and counterproductive.

Do the work centrally. Assembling the evidence of impact is a leadership job. Asking every teacher to produce a folder is how you exhaust a team for no gain.

Tell staff what’s happening and what’s expected of them, plainly. Most anxiety in these situations comes from not knowing. Under the renewed framework inspectors leave the site by 5pm, and saying so is a small thing that helps.

What if progress is genuinely slow?

Sometimes it is, and pretending otherwise makes things worse.

Where the improvement hasn’t happened, the useful question is why. There’s a real difference between a school that hasn’t done the work and a school that has done it and hasn’t yet seen impact. The second is a normal position, particularly where curriculum or culture change is involved, and it’s explicable.

Be honest about the reasons, including the uncomfortable ones. Leadership instability, staff turnover, a vacancy you couldn’t fill. Those are real explanations rather than excuses, provided you can also say what you’re doing about them.

What doesn’t work is a school claiming progress that the evidence contradicts. That damages the leadership judgement on top of the original issue, and it’s harder to recover from than slow progress honestly reported.

Where a board genuinely doesn’t know how much progress has been made, an independent review before the monitoring visit gives you an external, evidenced answer rather than an internal impression.

From our experience

The schools that do well in monitoring inspections during an interim placement are the ones where the board is as prepared as the leader.

Inspectors will speak to the proprietor or governors as part of leadership and governance, and that conversation frequently decides how the capacity question is answered. A board that can describe the brief, the timeline and the permanent plan confidently changes the picture considerably.

We often see the opposite. The interim is well prepared and the board hasn’t thought about what it will say. Two different accounts of the leadership arrangement is a finding in itself.

Many interim leaders tell us the most useful thing they did was keep a running record from day one: what they found, what they did, what changed. Assembling that retrospectively in the week before a monitoring visit is far harder than maintaining it as you go.

A common misconception

“Having an interim head will count against us in a monitoring inspection.”

It’s the assumption almost every board makes and it isn’t right.

What counts against a school is instability without a plan: a series of temporary arrangements, no clear timeline, and improvement that depends entirely on whoever happens to be in post. What doesn’t count against a school is a deliberate interim appointment with a clear brief, evidenced progress and a dated plan for permanent leadership.

In our experience, boards that appointed an experienced interim promptly and briefed them properly are viewed as having acted decisively. The board that left a deputy covering headship for two terms with no arrangement is the one with a problem.

The children in a school under monitoring need the improvement to actually happen. A board that got capable leadership into the building quickly has done the right thing by them, and that’s a defensible position however temporary the arrangement is.

Questions for boards and interim leaders

• Can we evidence what has changed, or only what we have done?
• Is the improvement held by systems and named staff, or by the interim personally?
• Do we have a dated plan for permanent leadership that we can state confidently?
• Would the board and the interim give the same account of the arrangement?
• Are we preparing evidence, or preparing a performance?

Our perspective

A monitoring inspection asks whether a school is getting better and whether it has the leadership to keep getting better. Both of those are answerable during an interim placement.

Keep a record from day one. Evidence impact rather than activity. Be honest about what hasn’t moved and why. Make sure the improvement is embedded in the school rather than in one person. And get the board as prepared as the leader, because the capacity question is often answered in that conversation.

Do that and a monitoring visit becomes a checkpoint rather than a threat, which is what it’s meant to be, and the children in the school get the improvement they were owed.