What Happens When Your Substantive Headteacher Returns

A practical guide for proprietors, boards and returning school leaders

Boards plan carefully for a headteacher’s absence and hardly at all for their return. It’s understandable. The departure is the crisis, the return feels like the resolution, and by the time it arrives everyone is relieved rather than thinking.

Many leaders tell us the return was harder than the leaving. A school that has adapted, a staff who have formed new loyalties, changes made in good faith that the returning head didn’t choose, and a leader coming back after illness or maternity leave who is expected to be immediately at full capacity.

None of that is anyone’s fault. It’s simply what happens when a school carries on without someone, and it’s very manageable if you plan for it.

Why is the return harder than the departure?

Three things make it awkward, and they compound each other.

The school has moved on. Not disloyally, just practically. New routines, new decision makers, new working relationships. The returning head comes back to a school that has quietly reorganised itself around their absence.

Loyalties have shifted. Staff who have worked closely with an interim leader for two terms will have built a real relationship with them. That’s a sign the placement worked. It also means the returning head can feel like a visitor for a few weeks.

The returning head may not be at full capacity. Someone coming back from long term sickness, surgery or bereavement is often returning phased or fragile. Someone returning from maternity or shared parental leave is managing a substantially changed life. Expecting either to walk in and resume at full pace is unrealistic and unkind.

Plan the return from the start of the placement

The most useful thing a board can do is treat the return as part of the interim brief rather than an event at the end of it.

At the point of appointment, say who’s returning, roughly when, and that the interim’s job includes handing the school back well. That changes how the interim works. They’ll make changes in ways that can be explained and, where possible, reversed. They’ll keep a record of what they did and why. They’ll be careful about permanent commitments that bind their successor.

Where a return date is uncertain, as it often is after illness, agree review points instead. What you’re avoiding is a return arranged in three weeks at the end of a two term absence.

Build in an overlap

Even a few days of both leaders in the building is worth more than any document.

An overlap lets the returning head see the school running before they have to run it. It lets staff see the two leaders working together, which does more to settle a team than any announcement. And it allows the awkward questions to be asked directly rather than discovered in week three.

Where a phased return is happening for health reasons, the interim reducing gradually as the head increases is usually better than a hard switch, though it needs the reporting lines writing down or you’ll have two people apparently in charge.

What must the handover cover?

Shorter than a handover to a new head, because the returning leader knows the school. What they don’t know is what changed while they were away.

What changed and why. Structures, staffing, routines, policies. The reasoning matters more than the change itself.

Safeguarding. Open cases, new concerns, anything that arose during the absence, and the current state of the single central record. This needs a proper face to face handover.

People. Who joined, who left, who has grown, who’s struggling. Staff often develop noticeably during an absence and the returning head should know before they see it.

The external picture. Commissioner conversations, complaints, regulatory correspondence, and where the school stands on inspection readiness.

What’s unfinished. What was deliberately left for the returning head to decide. This is a courtesy and it’s usually the right call on anything strategic.

Should the returning head undo the interim’s changes?

Some, possibly. All of them, no, and the instinct to do so is worth resisting for a few weeks.

It’s completely understandable to come back and want to restore the school you left. But some changes were made because something wasn’t working, and the interim may have seen it more clearly precisely because they were new. Others were made for the absence and are no longer needed.

We’d suggest giving it half a term before reversing anything that isn’t causing harm. Ask staff what has improved. Some of the answers will be uncomfortable and most will be useful.

Where something does need to change back, say why. Staff who invested in a new way of working and watch it disappear without explanation will be slower to invest next time.

Telling staff, parents and placing authorities

Announce the return properly rather than letting it emerge.

For staff, thank the interim publicly and specifically. A team that has been through a leadership change needs to hear that the period counted for something. Then be clear about who leads from when.

For parents, a short note is enough. Families in specialist settings notice leadership changes and appreciate being told rather than working it out.

For placing authorities and commissioners, a direct message is worth the ten minutes. They’ve been watching your leadership stability, and confirming the substantive head is back is a reassuring thing to be able to say.

What if the return doesn’t happen?

Sometimes it doesn’t. A head on long term sick leave decides not to come back. A leader on maternity leave chooses not to return.

Handle it as its own decision rather than as a failed return. Where you’re notified late, you may need to extend the interim while you run a proper headship recruitment. Where you have advance notice, use it.

What we’d caution against is pressing a leader for a decision they’re not ready to make, particularly where health is involved. Take advice, be humane, and plan for both outcomes in the meantime.

From our experience

Returns go wrong quietly rather than dramatically. Nobody argues. The returning head simply feels displaced for a term, makes a few changes to reassert themselves, and the school spends half a year unsettled.

We often see boards give this no attention at all, having given the departure a great deal. Many leaders tell us nobody asked how the return was going until it had already been difficult for weeks.

Schools that manage this well do two simple things. They overlap the leaders, even briefly, and the board meets the returning head before their first day to talk about what’s changed. Both cost almost nothing.

A common misconception

“They know the school, so they can just pick up where they left off.”

They know the school they left. Two terms is long enough for a specialist setting to change substantially, and after a health related absence the person returning may not be the person who left either.

Treating the return as a non event is how good heads end up struggling in their own school. A returning leader deserves the same thought given to a new appointment, and the children in the school benefit from a return that’s steady rather than one that unsettles them again.

Questions for proprietors and boards

• Have we planned the return, or only the absence?
• Is there an overlap, and is it long enough given how long they’ve been away?
• Has anyone written down what changed and why?
• Are we expecting full capacity from day one, and is that realistic?
• Have we thanked the interim publicly and told staff clearly who leads from when?

Our perspective

A return should be the easiest part of an absence and it’s frequently the part that goes least well, simply because nobody planned it.

Name it at the start of the placement, build in an overlap, hand over properly, and give the returning head time before expecting everything to be as it was. Resist the urge to undo good changes just because someone else made them.

Do that and the school gains from both leaders rather than lurching between them, which is what the children and young people in it needed from the moment their headteacher first went away.