Planning the Handover from Interim to Permanent Headteacher

A practical guide for proprietors, boards and trustees

Boards put considerable effort into appointing an interim and considerable effort into recruiting the permanent head. The bit in between gets far less attention, and it’s the bit that decides whether any of the work holds.

Many leaders tell us the same story. A good interim period, real progress, a strong permanent appointment, and then six months later the school has quietly slipped back to where it started. Nobody did anything wrong. The knowledge simply didn’t make the journey from one leader to the next.

It’s understandable that handover gets squeezed. It happens at the end of a term, when everyone is tired and the interim is already thinking about their next placement. But an hour of planning at the start is worth a week of catching up later.

Why does the handover decide whether improvement holds?

An interim headteacher spends a term or two learning things that took the school years to accumulate. Which member of staff is quietly carrying the safeguarding culture. Why the behaviour policy says one thing and practice says another. Which commissioner needs a phone call rather than an email. What was tried three years ago and why it failed.

Almost none of that is written down anywhere. If it leaves with the interim, the incoming head starts from the same standing start the interim did, and spends their first term rediscovering it.

There’s a second risk that boards underestimate. Changes made during an interim period are often held in place by the interim personally rather than by any system. New meeting structures, a tighter safeguarding routine, a stronger line on something that had drifted. The moment the person holding it leaves, it reverts, unless somebody has deliberately embedded it.

Start planning the handover at the beginning

The single most useful thing a board can do is put handover in the brief on day one.

Ask, at the point of appointment, what the interim will leave behind and for whom. Written position statement, safeguarding handover, an honest assessment of the senior team, the state of the improvement plan. Naming it at the start changes how the interim works throughout, because they’re building towards a handover rather than towards their last day.

It also removes an awkwardness. An interim asked at the end to write a candid assessment of the staff they’ve been working with is in a difficult position. One who agreed to do it at the start is simply doing their job.

What should the written handover contain?

Six to ten pages is usually right. Anything longer doesn’t get read.

Where the school actually is. An honest position statement against the standards the school is measured by, including the things that haven’t been fixed.

Safeguarding. Open cases, live concerns, the state of the single central record, training gaps, and an assessment of culture rather than only compliance. This should be handed over face to face as well as in writing.

The improvement plan. What’s genuinely closed, what’s in progress, and what was deliberately parked and why. The “why” matters, because otherwise the new head restarts something that was stopped for a good reason.

Staffing. Who’s strong, who’s struggling, who’s carrying more than they should, where the vacancies and risks sit. This is the most sensitive section and the most valuable.

The external picture. Commissioner relationships, placing authority contacts, any regulatory correspondence, complaints history, inspection position and where you sit on inspection readiness.

Finance and operations. Placement numbers, budget position, contracts coming up for renewal, premises issues.

What I would do next. The interim’s own view of the first three priorities. The incoming head is free to disagree, but they should know what an experienced outsider thought after two terms in the building.

The conversations that matter

The document is the smaller half. Three conversations do more.

Interim to incoming head, without the board present. This is where the honest version gets said. Boards sometimes want to sit in, and we’d encourage them not to. An interim will be more candid about a difficult member of staff or a governance weakness in a room without the proprietor in it.

Interim to board. A separate session, covering what the board itself needs to do differently. Interims often see governance problems clearly precisely because they’re leaving, and an external review of governance is worth considering if the same points keep surfacing. That conversation rarely happens unless it’s scheduled.

Interim to senior team. A proper close, so the team hears from the interim what they’ve achieved and what they’re handing on. This matters more than it sounds. Staff who have been through a leadership change need to feel the period counted for something.

Should there be an overlap?

Where you can afford it, yes. Even three or four days of the two leaders in the building together is worth more than a fortnight of documents.

An overlap lets the incoming head be introduced to commissioners and parents by someone who already has their confidence. It lets them see the school running rather than read about it. And it means the questions that only occur to you once you’re in the building can be answered by the person who knows.

Where an overlap isn’t possible, ask the interim to be available for two or three phone calls over the following half term. Most will agree readily, and it costs very little.

From our experience

The handovers that work are the ones planned at the start. We often see boards raise it in the final fortnight, by which point the interim is winding down and the document becomes a summary rather than a genuine transfer.

The most common gap is staffing. Interims are understandably cautious about writing down a candid view of individuals, particularly if they’re not sure who’ll read it. Agreeing the audience for that section at the outset solves it, and it’s the section incoming heads tell us they most wish they’d had.

Many leaders tell us they inherited a school and spent a term working out things their predecessor could have told them in an afternoon. Schools that manage this well treat handover as part of the placement rather than an afterthought at the end of it.

A common misconception

“The new head will want to make their own assessment, so a detailed handover is wasted effort.”

They will, and they should. But there’s a difference between forming your own judgement and having no information at all.

An incoming head who reads an honest handover can test it against what they see, agree with some of it and disagree with the rest. That’s a much stronger position than starting blind and spending a term reconstructing what somebody already knew.

The children in the school don’t get a settling in period while the adults work each other out. Every week the new head spends rediscovering the obvious is a week not spent on them.

Questions for boards and proprietors

• Did we ask for a handover at the point of appointment, or are we asking now?
• Who is the honest staffing assessment for, and has the interim been told?
• Can we fund even a short overlap between the two leaders?
• Which of the interim’s changes are held by a system, and which are held by the person?
• When will we check what has held, and is it in the diary?

Our perspective

Handover is where an interim period either becomes lasting improvement or becomes an expensive holding pattern. It costs almost nothing to do well and it’s routinely the first thing to be dropped.

Schools that come through leadership change strongest treat the handover as the point of the placement rather than the end of it. They ask for it early, they make time for the conversations, and they check a term later whether it held.

That’s what turns a stable term into a genuinely stronger school for the children and young people in it, which is the only reason any of this was worth doing.