Interim Leadership When Two Senior Leaders Leave at Once

A practical guide for proprietors, boards and trustees

Losing a headteacher isn’t easy and it’s manageable. Losing the head and the deputy in the same half term is a different situation, and it needs treating as one rather than as two separate vacancies.

Many proprietors tell us they responded to the second resignation the way they’d responded to the first, and only realised weeks later that the school had lost most of its operating knowledge in a fortnight.

It’s more common than boards expect, and there’s usually a reason worth understanding before you appoint anyone.

Why does it usually happen?

Rarely coincidence. Four causes account for most of it.

The second departure follows the first. A deputy who has watched their head leave, or has absorbed the head’s job for a term, decides they’d rather not do this again. This is the most common pattern by a distance.

Both were carrying too much. In a small specialist setting two people frequently hold everything. When it becomes unsustainable, it becomes unsustainable for both.

Something happened. A serious incident, a difficult inspection, a governance breakdown. People who lived through it together frequently leave together.

The problem is above them. Where the relationship with the proprietor or board was the issue, both leaders will have experienced it.

That last one is uncomfortable and worth facing. If your senior team has left together, ask honestly whether the cause sits with them or with the arrangement around them, because appointing two replacements into the same conditions produces the same result.

The first fortnight

Five things, and the order matters.

Safeguarding. If either departing leader held the designated safeguarding lead role, name a replacement today with current training, and tell every member of staff. This cannot wait for the wider plan.

Work out what has actually gone. Not the job titles. The functions. Ask the remaining team to list what those two people held, including the informal things. The list will be longer than the job descriptions and it’s the basis for everything else.

Name who’s leading, in writing. Even temporarily, even for a fortnight.

Reduce what the school is attempting. A school with half its senior leadership cannot deliver the same programme. Decide explicitly what pauses and tell staff, so it reads as a plan rather than as drift.

Talk to your commissioners. Two departures is the kind of thing placing authorities notice. Get ahead of it.

Don’t promote two people at once

This is the instinct and it’s usually the wrong move.

Promoting a teacher to deputy and a deputy to head simultaneously means two people learning new jobs at the same time, in a school that has just lost its experience, with nobody above them who’s done either role here.

It also creates a third gap where the promoted teacher was, and in a small school that’s frequently a class or a specialist function you can’t backfill.

The stronger pattern is to bring experience in above and develop internally underneath. An interim head with a promoted internal deputy gives you experience where you’ve lost it and development where you can afford it. The internal person gets support rather than being thrown in.

Where you do promote, make it a proper appointment: written, paid, dated, with something taken off them and coaching funded alongside.

One interim or two?

Depends on what’s left and what the school needs.

One interim, usually at headship level, works where there’s a capable person underneath who can hold operations, or where the school is small enough for one leader to carry both functions for a term.

Two, or one plus targeted specialist cover, works where the school has genuinely lost both leadership and operational capacity, or where the deputy held safeguarding and SEND and nobody internally can pick that up.

The second option costs more and it’s frequently the honest answer. A single interim covering two roles in a school that has just lost two leaders is being set up to do both badly, which is the same mistake the departing leaders may have been living with.

A useful middle option is an interim head full time with an interim SENCo or safeguarding lead two or three days a week, which is considerably cheaper than two headship level placements.

What should the brief include?

Beyond the usual objectives, three things specific to this situation.

Find out why they left. Ask the interim to give you an honest view within six weeks. If the cause was structural, you need to know before you rebuild.

Rebuild leadership capacity, not just fill the roles. Design a structure the school can sustain, which may not be the one that just collapsed.

Stabilise the remaining team. Two departures at the top usually means more coming. Identify who’s carrying the most and who’s at risk of being next.

Alongside that, an independent review early in the placement gives the board an external read rather than relying on one person’s account of a situation they’ve just arrived in.

Watch for the third departure

After two senior leaders go, the next resignation is frequently the person who has been holding everything together underneath them.

That’ll typically be an assistant head, a SENCo or a long standing senior teacher who has absorbed both departing portfolios and hasn’t complained. They’re the most valuable person in the building and the most likely to leave next.

Speak to them directly and specifically within the first fortnight. Ask what they’ve picked up, take some of it off them, and pay them for what remains. Retention at this point is worth more than any appointment.

From our experience

The cause is above the departing leaders more often than boards want to hear.

Where a head and deputy leave within a term of each other, and particularly where it has happened before, the pattern is usually about the structure, the workload or the relationship with the proprietor rather than about the individuals.

Many proprietors tell us the interim’s honest assessment in week six was uncomfortable and was the most useful thing they got from the placement. It’s also the thing that prevents the same situation in two years.

The other consistent finding is the third departure, and boards almost never see it coming. The person carrying everything is by definition the one not complaining.

A common misconception

“We just need to fill two posts.”

You need to work out why two posts became vacant, and then design a structure that doesn’t produce the same outcome.

Filling both roles with the same job descriptions, the same workload and the same arrangements above them is how a school ends up doing this again in three years, having spent two rounds of recruitment and a great deal of goodwill.

The children in your school have now experienced two leadership departures. What they need is stability, and stability comes from a structure that people can sustain rather than from filling the boxes on an organisation chart that has already failed once.

Questions for proprietors and boards

• Have we asked honestly why both of them left?
• Do we know what functions have gone, not just what titles?
• Who is carrying the most right now, and have we spoken to them?
• Are we about to promote two people at once into an unsupported structure?
• Is the structure we’re rebuilding one that anyone could sustain?

Our perspective

Two departures at once is a signal as well as a problem, and boards that treat it only as a staffing exercise usually repeat it.

Cover safeguarding today. Map the functions rather than the titles. Bring experience in above and develop internally underneath rather than promoting two people at once. Protect whoever is holding the school together now. And ask for an honest external view of why this happened before you rebuild.

Do that and a difficult term becomes the point at which the school got a structure it can actually sustain, which is what the children and young people in it need after a period of real disruption.