Managing a Leadership Vacancy Without an Interim

A practical guide for proprietors, boards and trustees

Not every leadership vacancy needs an interim appointment, and it would be dishonest of us to suggest otherwise.

Plenty of schools manage a term without a headteacher perfectly well, and for a small setting with a tight budget and a capable deputy, that’s often the right call. Many proprietors tell us they felt pressured into thinking an interim was the only responsible option, when what they actually needed was a bit of structure around what they already had.

This guide is about doing that properly. It also sets out the point at which managing without stops being sensible, because that line is easier to see in advance than from the other side of it.

When is managing without an interim realistic?

Several things need to be true at once.

You have a deputy or senior leader who’s genuinely capable of holding the role, not just willing to try. The vacancy is short and defined, with a permanent head appointed or a clear recruitment timeline. The school is stable, with no regulatory pressure, no live investigation and no inspection expected. You can actually reduce that person’s substantive workload rather than adding headship to it. And the board has the capacity to be more actively involved than usual.

If most of those hold, managing without is reasonable. If two or three don’t, you’re not saving money, you’re deferring a cost.

What has to be covered regardless?

Whatever you decide about a leader, some things don’t become optional because there’s a vacancy.

Safeguarding leadership. A named, trained designated safeguarding lead with the capacity to do it properly. Not a name on a poster. Someone who’s available, who reviews cases, and who staff know to go to. This is the one that cannot be part covered.

Statutory compliance. Your duties under the standards you’re measured by continue exactly as before. Policies, records, training, the single central record, health and safety.

Statutory deadlines. Annual returns, census, reporting duties, EHCP annual reviews. These have dates attached and the dates don’t move.

A decision maker. Someone with written authority to decide things, in figures. Vacancies stall when nobody knows who can approve a £3,000 spend or accept a placement.

An external point of contact. Commissioners, placing authorities and parents need a named person who answers.

Supporting the person holding it

If a deputy or senior leader is carrying headship, four things make the difference between this working and this being the thing that makes them leave.

Pay them. An acting allowance, agreed in writing, from the first day. Not backdated at the end if it goes well.

Take something off them. This is the one that gets skipped. Backfill their teaching, move their line management, drop something from the improvement plan. If nothing comes off, you haven’t given them headship, you’ve given them two jobs.

Set an end date. Even a provisional one. Open ended acting arrangements are the ones that damage people.

Give them someone to talk to. A first time acting head making decisions alone at nine on a difficult morning needs an experienced person to test a judgement against. Coaching or mentoring costs a fraction of an interim placement and is often precisely what was actually needed.

Reduce what the school is trying to do

This is the step boards most often miss, and it’s the one that makes the arrangement survivable.

A school without a headteacher has less leadership capacity than it had. Expecting it to deliver the same improvement plan, the same development programme and the same pace of change is simply arithmetic that doesn’t work.

Decide deliberately what pauses. Perhaps the curriculum review waits a term. Perhaps the new assessment system is deferred. Perhaps two of the five improvement priorities are parked with a note explaining why.

Then tell staff. A team that knows the school is deliberately holding three things until September works differently from one that watches everything slide and assumes nobody is in control.

Buying help without buying a leader

There’s a middle ground between full interim leadership and nothing, and it’s frequently the best value option available.

Coaching for the acting head, perhaps a couple of sessions a month. A specialist to do one defined piece of work, such as a safeguarding audit or preparing for an inspection window. An independent review to give the board an accurate picture so it can govern properly during the gap. A few days of experienced leadership time each month to take the heaviest items off the acting head.

All of these are considerably cheaper than an interim placement and they address the specific gap rather than replacing the whole role.

When should you change your mind?

Watch for these, and treat any two of them as a prompt to reconsider.

The acting head is visibly struggling or has stopped saying so. Statutory deadlines have been missed. Safeguarding is being administered rather than led. Staff have started leaving, or good people have gone quiet. Commissioners have begun asking about stability. The recruitment round hasn’t produced a viable candidate. Something significant has landed, such as regulatory correspondence or a serious complaint.

Changing your mind isn’t a failure. The failure is deciding in September that you’ll manage without and never revisiting it in February when the picture has changed.

From our experience

The schools that manage without an interim successfully are the ones that treated it as an active plan rather than an absence of one. Written arrangement, real workload reduction, reduced ambitions for the term, and a board that showed up more often.

The ones that struggle look identical on day one and different by half term. Nothing was written down, nothing came off the deputy’s plate, the improvement plan carried on as though nothing had changed, and everyone was too busy to notice it wasn’t working until something went wrong.

Many leaders tell us the hardest part wasn’t the workload. It was the absence of anyone to think out loud with. That’s an inexpensive thing to fix and it’s routinely the thing nobody arranges.

A common misconception

“Managing without an interim is the cheap option.”

It can be, and often is, but only where it’s been resourced. The version where a deputy absorbs headship on top of their own job for two terms has real costs. They just arrive later, as staff turnover, a stalled improvement plan, a deputy who resigns, or an inspection outcome that traces back to a period nobody was leading.

The children in the school experience that period as a term where things were a bit less good than they should have been. That’s the cost worth weighing, alongside the invoice you didn’t have to pay.

Questions for proprietors and boards

• Is our acting leader genuinely capable of this, or willing to try?
• What specifically have we taken off their plate, and can we name it?
• What has the school agreed to stop doing this term, and do staff know?
• Who does our acting head talk to when a decision is hard?
• What would have to happen for us to change this decision, and when will we look again?

Our perspective

Managing a vacancy without an interim is a legitimate choice and often the right one. It stops being legitimate when it’s a default rather than a decision.

If you’re going to do it, do it properly. Write the arrangement down, pay the person holding it, take real work off them, reduce what the school is attempting, buy the specific help that plugs the actual gap, and set a date to look at it again.

That gives you a school that’s genuinely held rather than one that’s quietly coasting, which is what the children and young people in it need while the adults sort out who’s leading them next.