Protecting Staff Workload During a Leadership Transition

A practical guide for proprietors, boards and senior leaders

When a headteacher leaves, the work they were doing doesn’t leave with them. It gets absorbed, quietly, by people who were already busy, and almost nobody sits down and decides where it went.

Many proprietors tell us they thought the school had coped well with a leadership change. Then two experienced staff resigned in the same fortnight and it became clear the school had coped by asking a small number of people to carry considerably more than anyone had noticed.

It’s an understandable blind spot. Overload during a transition is invisible until it isn’t, and by then you’ve usually lost someone.

Why do transitions overload people so quietly?

Because the work redistributes itself rather than being redistributed.

A headteacher’s role isn’t a list of tasks. It’s a large number of small things nobody has written down: the parent who only speaks to the head, the commissioner who phones directly, the safeguarding decision that gets made in a corridor, the sign off nobody realised was needed.

When they leave, each of those finds its way to whoever is nearest. Individually every item looks small. Collectively they add up to most of a job, distributed across three or four people who are all doing their own.

Nobody complains, because nobody is carrying an obviously unreasonable amount. They’re each carrying a bit more than they should, and the cumulative effect only shows up as tiredness, slipped deadlines and eventually a resignation.

In a small special school this happens faster, because there are fewer people to absorb it and the pastoral load is heavier to begin with.

Find out what has actually moved

The first thing to do is genuinely simple and almost never done.

Ask each member of the senior team, and a few people beyond it, to write down what they’ve picked up since the departure. Not their whole role. Just the additions.

The list is usually longer than anyone expected, and it will include things nobody knew the head was doing. That document is the basis for every decision that follows, and producing it takes an afternoon.

Then ask a second question: what have you stopped doing to make room? If the answer is “nothing”, you’ve found your problem.

What should you stop during a transition?

This is the step boards skip and it’s the one that makes everything else survivable.

A school with less leadership capacity cannot deliver the same programme. That’s arithmetic, not defeatism. Expecting the same improvement plan, the same development programme and the same pace of change is how people get overloaded.

Decide deliberately what pauses. Perhaps two of the five improvement priorities wait until September. Perhaps the new assessment system is deferred. Perhaps learning walks reduce to half. Perhaps a working group stops meeting.

Then tell staff explicitly. A team that knows the school has decided to hold three things until next term works entirely differently from one that watches things slide and assumes nobody is in control. The first is a plan. The second feels like drift.

What must not stop is safeguarding, statutory compliance and anything with a deadline attached. Everything else is available for discussion.

Where does interim capacity actually help?

The obvious answer is a full interim headteacher, and where the whole role needs covering that’s right.

But targeted capacity is often better value and it’s rarely considered. An interim deputy two days a week to cover the specific things that have landed on your acting head. An interim SENCo or designated safeguarding lead for a term. A specialist to complete one defined piece of work that’s currently sitting undone, or an independent review so the board can see where the pressure genuinely is.

The test is where the pressure genuinely is rather than where the vacancy is. Sometimes the person struggling most isn’t the acting head at all. It’s the assistant head who inherited behaviour and safeguarding, and two days a week of support for them protects the school more than headship cover would.

Recognising and paying for the extra

Two separate things and both matter.

Pay it. Where someone is carrying additional responsibility, agree an allowance in writing from day one. Not backdated at the end if it goes well, which is what usually happens and which people find insulting rather than generous.

Say it. Recognition isn’t a substitute for pay and it isn’t nothing either. Naming specifically what someone has held, in front of colleagues, matters to people. Many staff tell us the thing that hurt wasn’t the extra work. It was nobody appearing to notice.

Where the arrangement is temporary, give it an end date. Open ended additional responsibility is the version that damages people, because there’s nothing to hold on for.

Watch for the second departure

Boards consistently miss this and it’s the most costly part.

Resignations after a leadership change tend to come at the end of the first term rather than immediately. People wait to see whether it settles. If it hasn’t by Christmas, the ones with options start using them.

And it’s usually the people who carried the most. They’ve held the school together, they’re exhausted, they’ve watched the additional work become permanent by default, and they leave.

That second departure is worse than the first, because you lose institutional knowledge and capacity at the point where you were relying on both. Check in specifically with the two or three people carrying the most, and if retention is already a concern, act before the notices arrive rather than after.

From our experience

The overload is almost always concentrated rather than spread. Two or three people are carrying nearly all of it, and they’re usually the most capable and the least likely to complain.

We often find a school where the acting head is coping visibly and an assistant head is quietly holding safeguarding, behaviour, a teaching commitment and the parent complaints that used to go to the head. Nobody had counted it up.

Many leaders tell us they’d have said something if they’d been asked directly. They weren’t going to volunteer it during a difficult period, because that felt like adding to the board’s problems.

Schools that manage this well ask the question explicitly, decide what to stop, pay for what people are carrying, and check again in December.

A common misconception

“Our team is pulling together, which shows how strong the culture is.”

It often does show that, and a strong team pulling together is a genuine asset. The difficulty is that it’s also what conceals the problem.

Committed staff in specialist settings will absorb an extraordinary amount before saying anything, because they’re thinking about the children rather than about themselves. That willingness is exactly why boards must count the load rather than waiting to be told about it.

Pulling together is sustainable for a term. Beyond that it stops being culture and starts being attrition, and the children in the school lose the relationships that were holding their education together.

Questions for proprietors and boards

• Do we know what each person has picked up since the departure, in writing?
• What has the school stopped doing this term, and do staff know?
• Who is carrying the most, and have we spoken to them individually?
• Is everyone with additional responsibility being paid for it, from day one?
• What is our plan for the end of the first term, when people decide whether to stay?

Our perspective

Workload during a transition is the thing boards notice last and pay for longest.

Count what has moved. Decide what stops and say so. Pay people for what they’re carrying and name it publicly. Buy targeted capacity where the pressure actually is rather than where the vacancy is. And check again in December, because that’s when the decisions get made.

An afternoon spent counting the load protects the staff who make your provision work, and it protects the children and young people whose education depends entirely on those people still being there next year.