Recruitment Agency or Education Consultancy: Who Should Place Your Interim Leader?

A practical guide for proprietors, boards and trustees

When a school needs an interim leader quickly, the first question is usually who to call. The market offers two broad kinds of provider and they work quite differently, though the marketing often sounds identical.

We should be straightforward here: Jarvis Education is one of the providers in this market, so we have an interest in how you answer this. What follows is our honest read of what each type does well, including the things a consultancy does less well, so you can decide rather than be sold to.

What does a recruitment agency do well?

Agencies are built for supply, and where supply is the problem they’re genuinely strong.

Speed and reach. A large agency holds a substantial database and can put names in front of you within a day or two. When a head has walked out and you need someone next week, that matters.

Volume of options. More candidates to choose between, which is useful where your requirements are broad or where geography is the constraint.

Established compliance processes. A reputable education agency will hold DBS checks, verify prohibition checks and maintain candidate files as a matter of routine, because it’s core to their business model.

Administrative simplicity. They handle the contracting, the invoicing and the payroll arrangements, and you deal with one relationship.

The limitation is that agencies match rather than assess. A good consultant at an agency will know their candidates well. What they generally can’t do is form an independent professional judgement about whether this leader is right for the specific situation your school is in, because that requires having led or inspected schools rather than having placed people in them.

What does an education consultancy do well?

Professional judgement about the setting. A consultancy led by people who’ve run or inspected schools can look at your situation and tell you what kind of leader it needs, or whether it needs one at all. Sometimes the honest answer is that a defined piece of work would serve you better than a placement.

Specialist knowledge. In independent special schools and alternative provision, knowing the difference between a leader who’s run a residential setting and one who hasn’t is the whole job. That’s a professional judgement rather than a database filter.

Support around the placement. A consultancy can wrap an independent review or specialist support around an interim, so the board gets an accurate picture and the interim isn’t doing everything alone.

Continuity into what comes next. The same organisation can support the permanent recruitment and the handover, which means the knowledge doesn’t reset.

The limitations are real too. A consultancy’s pool is smaller. If your requirement is broad and your priority is choice, an agency will give you more names. And a consultancy that only ever recommends its own services is worth being wary of, whoever it is.

What about cost?

Compare total cost rather than headline rates, because the two provider types structure things differently.

Agencies typically charge a margin on the day rate, which is often not visible to you. Consultancies more often quote a rate with the margin disclosed, or work on an introduction fee basis where you contract directly with the leader.

Ask both the same questions. What is the day rate the school pays? What does the interim receive? What is the conversion fee if we appoint permanently, and does it reduce over time? What happens, and what does it cost, if the placement fails? Are there charges for holidays, INSET or board meetings?

Any provider unwilling to answer those in writing is telling you something. From our experience, the arguments that arise later are almost always about a figure nobody disclosed at the start.

The conflict of interest question

Worth asking directly, and it cuts both ways.

An agency is paid when a placement happens. That’s a straightforward commercial incentive to tell you a placement is what you need.

A consultancy that also sells reviews, audits, training and permanent recruitment has more products to sell and therefore, arguably, more scope to sell you something. The honest counterweight is that it also has more ways to say “you don’t need an interim, you need two days of coaching”, and can afford to.

The test isn’t which model is purer. It’s whether the provider has ever told you something against their own interest. Ask them directly: when did you last tell a school it didn’t need what it was asking for? A provider with a real answer is worth more than one with a good pitch.

How should you choose?

Match the provider to the problem.

An agency usually fits where you need someone fast, where the requirement is well defined, where you already know what kind of leader you want, and where you have the internal capacity to assess candidates yourself.

A consultancy usually fits where the setting is specialist, where you’re not certain what you need, where there’s a regulatory or improvement dimension, where the board wants an honest external read as well as a person, or where the appointment carries unusual risk.

And sometimes the answer is both. Some schools use a consultancy to define the brief and assess the shortlist, and an agency to supply the names. That’s a perfectly sensible arrangement and no good provider should object to it.

From our experience

The mistake we see most often isn’t choosing the wrong type of provider. It’s choosing before defining the brief.

A board that can’t say what the placement must achieve will get candidates matched against a vague description from either type of provider, and will then struggle to choose between them. Half a page written first changes the whole conversation.

Many proprietors tell us the thing they valued most in hindsight was a provider being honest about what they couldn’t do. An agency saying they didn’t have anyone with residential experience, or a consultancy saying the situation needed a permanent appointment rather than an interim. That honesty is rarer than it should be and it’s the strongest signal available.

The other pattern is undisclosed conversion fees, which we’ve now seen enough times to think it’s structural rather than accidental. Ask at the start, always.

A common misconception

“A consultancy will be more expensive than an agency.”

Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t, and the headline comparison is usually misleading because agency margins are often invisible while consultancy fees are stated.

The more useful comparison is total cost including what happens if the placement doesn’t work, and against what you’re actually buying. A cheaper placement that addresses the wrong problem isn’t good value, and neither is an expensive one that duplicates capacity you already had.

The question to hold is what this school needs to be true in two terms, and which route is most likely to get you there. That’s the figure that matters to the children in your school, and it rarely appears on either invoice.

Questions for proprietors and boards

• Have we written the brief before choosing a provider?
• Who will actually do the work, and what settings have they led or inspected?
• Do we have the day rate, conversion fee and failure terms in writing from each?
• Which checks does each provider hold, and what remains ours?
• Has either of them told us anything against their own interest?

Our perspective

Both models work, and plenty of schools are well served by each. The choice should follow from the problem rather than from who called you back first.

If you know what you need and you need it quickly, an agency is often the efficient answer. If the setting is specialist, or you’re not sure what the real problem is, professional judgement about the school is worth more than a longer list of names.

Whichever you choose, define the brief first, ask both the same questions, and get the answers in writing. That puts you in a position to choose well, which is what the children and young people in your school need from a decision being made on their behalf.