Interim Leadership When a Whistleblowing Concern Is Raised

A practical guide for proprietors, boards and trustees

A member of staff raises a concern about how the school is being run. Perhaps about safeguarding practice, perhaps about finances, perhaps about how a colleague is being treated. And the person they’d normally raise it with is part of what they’re raising it about.

Many proprietors tell us their first reaction was hurt. Someone in the school went outside rather than coming to them, and that stings, particularly in a small setting where relationships are close.

It’s an understandable reaction and it’s worth setting aside quickly, because how a board responds in the first week determines almost everything about what happens next. Schools that handle whistleblowing well usually end up stronger. Schools that handle it badly frequently end up in front of a regulator.

What actually counts as whistleblowing?

Whistleblowing has a specific legal meaning, and it’s narrower than everyday use suggests.

It’s a disclosure made in the public interest about a category of wrongdoing: a criminal offence, a failure to comply with a legal obligation, a miscarriage of justice, danger to health and safety, damage to the environment, or the concealment of any of these. In a school setting it most often concerns safeguarding practice, financial impropriety or health and safety.

A worker making a qualifying disclosure has legal protection from detriment and dismissal for having made it. That protection matters and it’s easy to breach without intending to.

What isn’t whistleblowing is a personal grievance about how someone has been treated, which goes through your grievance procedure instead. The distinction can blur, and where you’re unsure, take advice rather than deciding it’s a grievance because that’s simpler.

Who should investigate?

This is the first and most consequential decision.

The person or people the concern is about cannot investigate it, and neither can anyone who reports to them. In a small independent special school or alternative provision that often leaves nobody internally who’s genuinely independent, and boards sometimes proceed anyway because the alternative feels disproportionate.

It isn’t. An independent investigation commissioned externally is usually the right answer, and it protects everybody. It protects the person who raised the concern, it protects the person it’s about if the concern turns out to be unfounded, and it protects the board from a finding later that it investigated itself.

Where the concern is about safeguarding, involve your local authority designated officer or children’s social care as the nature of it requires, before you start any internal process. Where it concerns a child at risk, that referral comes first and everything else follows it.

When is interim leadership needed?

Not always, and it’s worth being honest about that rather than reaching for it automatically.

Where a concern is specific, quickly investigated and unfounded, the school carries on. Where it’s specific and substantiated but doesn’t concern the leadership, you address it and move on.

Interim leadership becomes necessary in three situations.

The concern is about the headteacher and they’ve been suspended or are otherwise unable to continue while it’s investigated.

The concern is about how the school is run in a way that means the current leadership can’t credibly lead the response. If the disclosure says safeguarding decisions have been overridden by the head, the head cannot lead the safeguarding improvement work.

The relationship has broken down. Sometimes the process, even a fair one, leaves a leadership team unable to function. That’s not anybody’s fault and it does need addressing.

An interim leader in these situations brings something internal cover can’t. They’ve never met anyone involved, and however the matter concludes, they’ll have moved on.

What not to do

Four things cause the most damage, and all of them happen with good intentions.

Don’t try to identify the source. Boards sometimes want to know who raised it, believing that helps them understand the context. It doesn’t, and pursuing it looks like exactly what it is.

Don’t change anything about that person’s role. A shift pattern altered, a responsibility moved, a class reallocated. Even where it’s coincidental, it will be read as detriment, and detriment following a protected disclosure is a serious matter.

Don’t rush to reassure. A board that announces within two days that it has looked into the matter and found nothing has told everyone it didn’t investigate properly.

Don’t leave it unanswered. A person who raises a concern and hears nothing for six weeks will usually take it further, to a regulator, a local authority or the press. Most external escalations we see happened because the internal response was silence rather than because the internal response was wrong.

Responding well

The schools that come out of this stronger do a few consistent things.

They acknowledge the disclosure promptly and say what will happen and roughly when. They commission independence where independence is needed. They keep the person who raised it informed at each stage, within what confidentiality allows. They act on what’s found, including the uncomfortable parts. And they look at why the concern was raised externally rather than internally, because that question usually matters more than the concern itself.

That last point is worth sitting with. A member of staff who felt able to raise something directly would generally have done so. If they didn’t, something about the culture told them not to, and that’s the finding underneath the finding. A safeguarding culture review will usually tell you what.

From our experience

The concern itself is frequently not the biggest issue. The response is.

We often see a board investigate a disclosure reasonably well and simultaneously make three decisions about the person who raised it that look, from any distance, like retaliation. None of them were intended that way. All of them are hard to defend afterwards.

Many leaders tell us that the thing that escalated a situation was silence. Weeks passed, the person heard nothing, and they concluded nobody was taking it seriously. A short holding letter would have prevented it.

Schools that recover well usually treat the disclosure as information rather than as an attack, even when it’s uncomfortable and even when parts of it turn out to be wrong.

A common misconception

“Someone going outside the school has been disloyal.”

It’s a completely human reaction and it’s the one that most often leads a board into difficulty.

The whistleblowing framework exists because people who see something wrong in an organisation are often the least powerful people in it, and because organisations reliably prefer to handle things quietly. Someone raising a concern about safeguarding practice in a school is doing what the framework asks of them, whatever the outcome turns out to be.

Treating that as disloyalty is the fastest route to a finding of detriment, and it tells every other member of staff that concerns are unwelcome here. The children in your school depend on adults who feel able to speak up. Protecting that is more important than the discomfort of any individual disclosure.

Questions for proprietors and boards

• Does our whistleblowing policy say what happens when the concern is about the headteacher or the proprietor?
• Do staff know how to raise a concern, would they believe something would happen, and does our training cover it?
• Is there anyone internally who could genuinely investigate this independently?
• Has the person who raised it been told what’s happening, and when?
• Why did this come to us this way rather than directly?

Our perspective

A whistleblowing disclosure is difficult to receive and it’s genuinely useful information about your school. Boards that treat it that way tend to come out of it in better shape than they went in.

Take advice, commission independence where you need it, protect the person who raised it absolutely, keep them informed, and act on what’s found. Where the leadership can’t credibly lead the response, bring in someone who can.

Then ask the harder question about why it was raised this way. That answer, more than the disclosure itself, is usually what makes the school safer for the children and young people in it.