Moving From Headship to Interim Leadership: What Changes

A practical guide for headteachers considering the move

Experienced heads considering interim work usually assume it’s headship with a shorter contract. It isn’t, and the differences catch people out in the first placement rather than in the decision.

Many leaders tell us the professional adjustment was straightforward and the personal one wasn’t. You keep the skills. What changes is your relationship to the school, and that turns out to be most of what headship was.

What stays the same?

More than you’d expect, which is why capable heads generally do this well.

You still lead safeguarding, still hold statutory responsibilities, still line manage a senior team, still answer to a board, still deal with parents and commissioners. On a Tuesday morning the job looks almost identical.

Your professional judgement transfers completely. Knowing what good teaching looks like, recognising a safeguarding culture that isn’t right, spotting a senior team that isn’t functioning. That’s the thing schools are paying for and it doesn’t diminish.

So does your credibility with staff, provided you don’t undermine it in the first fortnight.

What changes immediately?

Four things, from day one.

You have less informal authority. Your contract may give you the same powers. Staff know you’re leaving, and that changes how instructions land. Some will wait you out. Building authority by relationship rather than by position becomes the core skill.

You inherit rather than build. Every problem you find was created by someone else, often someone the staff liked. You have to address it without criticising them, which is harder than it sounds.

Your horizon is short. Substantive headship is a three to five year project. Interim work is two or three terms. You stop asking what this school should become and start asking what needs to be true when I leave.

You’re brought in because something is wrong. Very few interim placements are in settled, thriving schools. That’s the work, and it’s tiring in a way that steady headship isn’t.

The practical changes

These need attention before your first placement, not after.

Income becomes irregular. Day rates instead of a salary, gaps between placements, and periods where nothing is confirmed. Most interims budget for a meaningful number of unpaid weeks a year, particularly early on.

Your engagement route matters. Provider PAYE, your own limited company, or fixed term employment each carry different tax and administrative consequences. Take proper advice on the off-payroll working position for your circumstances rather than relying on what another consultant told you.

Your pension changes. This is the one experienced heads most often look at too late. Leaving a scheme you’ve been in for two decades has consequences worth understanding before you decide, not after.

You need your own insurance. Professional indemnity and public liability at a level appropriate to headship in specialist settings.

You maintain your own compliance file. DBS, prohibition checks, training certificates, references, placement dates. Schools will ask, and producing a complete file quickly is a genuine advantage.

The identity shift

This is the part nobody prepares you for and it’s the one most heads find hardest.

Headship is an identity. You are the headteacher of somewhere. People in your town know you. You watch children go through the school and see where they end up. Your professional life has a place attached to it.

Interim leadership doesn’t. You lead a school for two terms and then you don’t. You won’t see the Year 9s you worried about become Year 11s. You won’t be at the leavers’ assembly. Staff you worked closely with will move on and so will you.

Some leaders find that liberating. The job stops following you home, you don’t carry a school for years, and the variety is genuinely interesting. Others find it a real loss and go back to substantive headship after a year, which is a legitimate outcome rather than a failure.

It’s worth asking yourself honestly which you’d be, because the professional skills tell you nothing about the answer.

What the first placement usually teaches you

Three things come up almost universally, and knowing them in advance shortens the adjustment.

You need a brief. Heads used to setting their own direction find it strange to be given three objectives. It’s the thing that makes an interim placement work, and where a board hasn’t provided one, ask for it before you start. A placement without a brief drifts, and you’ll be judged against expectations nobody wrote down.

Week one is for listening. Every instinct built over years of headship says arrive and set direction. In an interim placement that reads as disruptive, and it costs you the honest information staff would otherwise have given you. Schools that recover well usually had an interim who spent a fortnight understanding before changing anything.

You’re being paid for honesty. A board commissioning an interim frequently wants an accurate read of their school more than they want any particular action. Many leaders tell us the most valuable thing they delivered was a written assessment in week four that named what nobody internally could say.

Where support comes from

Interim work is more isolating than headship, which surprises people who found headship isolating.

You have no peer group in the school, no local network of heads who know your setting, and no continuity of colleagues between placements. Building a small group of other interims to talk to is worth doing deliberately rather than hoping it happens.

Some interims also arrange their own coaching or supervision, particularly when working in schools dealing with serious safeguarding matters. That’s not a sign of struggling. It’s the same thing you’d have expected your own senior team to have.

What gets better

Worth naming, because the difficulties get more attention.

The brief is defined, which means you know what you’re being judged on. You can say the thing a permanent head would then have to live with having said. You leave, which means the weight doesn’t accumulate the way it does over a five year headship.

And the variety is real. Interims see more schools in three years than most heads see in a career, which makes you better at recognising what’s actually going on somewhere.

Many leaders tell us they came back to substantive headship afterwards as a considerably better headteacher, having seen how six other schools worked.

From our experience

The heads who struggle in their first placement are usually the ones who tried to lead the way they always had.

An approach built over five years in a school where everyone knew you doesn’t transfer to a building where you arrived a fortnight ago. The instinct to set direction early, entirely right in substantive headship, reads as disruptive in an interim placement.

Many leaders tell us the adjustment took a full placement to make. The second one felt completely different.

The other thing we see is people leaving substantive headship without taking pension and tax advice first, then discovering the position they’ve put themselves in. That’s an avoidable regret and it takes one meeting to prevent.

A common misconception

“It’s the same job with a shorter contract.”

The tasks are similar. The job is different, and the difference is mostly about your relationship to the school.

A substantive head builds something over years, carries it, and is carried by it. An interim holds something steady, names what’s wrong, hands it over and leaves. Those require different instincts, and being excellent at one doesn’t guarantee you’ll enjoy the other.

What transfers completely is what matters most: knowing what good looks like for children in a specialist setting, and being willing to say when it isn’t happening. That’s the thing schools need from an interim, and experienced heads already have it.

Questions for leaders considering the move

• Can I lead a school I’ll never see the outcomes of?
• Am I comfortable holding authority that comes from how I work rather than from my title?
• Have I taken pension, tax and insurance advice for my own circumstances?
• Can I budget for a year with meaningful gaps between placements?
• Do I want variety, or do I want somewhere that’s mine?

Our perspective

Moving from headship to interim leadership is a real career change rather than a variation on the same job, and it suits some excellent heads and not others.

Do the practical preparation properly: pension, tax, insurance, compliance file, and an honest financial plan for the first year. Then be ready for the professional adjustment, which is mostly about arriving without needing to prove anything and leading without belonging.

Get that right and it’s genuinely valuable work. Specialist settings that lose their leaders need experienced people who can steady them quickly, and there aren’t enough of them. The children in those schools benefit directly from leaders who are willing to do this.