What Is an Interim Executive Headteacher?

A practical guide for proprietors, boards and school groups

The title turns up in job adverts, in board papers and occasionally in regulatory correspondence, and it means slightly different things in each. Proprietors often ask us whether an interim executive headteacher is simply an interim head with a longer title, or something genuinely different.

It’s a fair question, because the distinction affects who’s accountable for what, how much you’re paying for, and what an inspector will expect to see. Used well, the role solves a problem that ordinary interim headship can’t. Used loosely, it creates confusion about who leads the school.

What is an interim executive headteacher?

An interim executive headteacher holds overall leadership accountability across more than one school, or above a head of school, for a defined period.

The word doing the work is executive. An interim headteacher leads one school and is in it most days. An interim executive headteacher usually sits above the day to day, with a head of school, a site lead or a senior leader running each setting, while they carry the accountability, set the direction and answer to the proprietor or board.

In practice that often means two or three days a week rather than five, spread across settings or focused on the things only they can do.

When does the role make sense?

Four situations come up most often.

A group with more than one setting. An independent special school group with three sites losing a head at one of them may not need a full time interim there. An executive arrangement gives the group leadership capacity and lets an existing senior leader step up with support and coaching above them.

Developing an internal leader. Where a deputy is nearly ready for headship but not quite, an interim executive head above them gives them the role with a safety net. This is one of the better uses of the model, because it develops someone rather than replacing them.

Significant improvement or regulatory work. Where a setting needs substantial change and the existing leadership can run the school but not lead the turnaround, an executive arrangement separates the two jobs.

A new setting opening. A group opening a new school often needs experienced accountability during registration and the first year, without appointing a permanent head before the school exists.

What does the role actually involve?

The work sits above the school day rather than in it.

• Holding accountability for standards, safeguarding and compliance across the settings in scope.
• Line managing heads of school or senior leaders, which is usually the largest part of the job.
• Reporting to the proprietor or board with an honest picture of each setting.
• Leading the improvement work that the day to day leaders don’t have capacity for.
• Holding the external relationships with commissioners, placing authorities and regulators.
• Building the leadership underneath them, which is the point of the arrangement if it’s working.

That last one matters. A good interim executive head should be making themselves progressively less necessary. If the heads of school are no more capable at the end than at the start, the arrangement hasn’t done its job.

Who leads safeguarding in an executive arrangement?

This is the question that goes wrong most often, and it needs answering in writing before anyone starts.

Each setting needs a designated safeguarding lead who’s present, known to staff and able to act on the day. That’s almost never the executive head, who may be on another site. What the executive head holds is accountability for whether safeguarding is being led well across the group, which is a different thing from holding the role.

Where this gets muddled, you end up with a school where the DSL thinks the executive head is deciding and the executive head thinks the DSL is. A safeguarding audit will surface that quickly, and so will an inspection.

The thing that goes wrong

Almost every difficulty we see with executive arrangements comes back to the same cause. Nobody wrote down where the line sits.

A head of school believes they’re leading the school. The executive head believes they’re leading it and the head of school is running operations. Neither is being unreasonable, and both are working hard. But decisions fall into the gap between them, staff learn to ask both and get different answers, and by half term the arrangement is generating more work than it saves.

It’s entirely fixable, and it takes about an hour. Write down what the head of school decides alone, what needs the executive head, and what goes to the proprietor. Put figures on spending limits. Say who a parent escalates to and who a commissioner phones.

What will inspectors look for?

Inspectors aren’t troubled by executive arrangements. They’re common and they work. What they’ll test is whether accountability is clear and whether leadership is effective in this setting, not across the group in general.

The awkward moment comes when an inspector asks a member of staff who leads the school and gets a hesitation. Or when the head of school can’t answer a question because it sits with someone who isn’t on site that day.

Schools that handle this well have a one page structure they can hand over, and every leader can describe their own remit without checking. That’s worth preparing as part of your inspection readiness rather than assembling it on the morning.

Being honest about the title

Sometimes the title is used because it sounds better than the alternative.

A board that can only afford two days a week may describe the arrangement as executive headship when what they’ve actually bought is part time interim headship with a gap. A single setting with no head of school underneath doesn’t have an executive arrangement. It has a school being led two days a week, and the other three days need naming.

That isn’t necessarily wrong, and part time interim leadership works well in plenty of settings. But calling it executive headship obscures the question that matters, which is who’s leading this school on Wednesday.

From our experience

The executive arrangements that work best are the ones with a genuinely capable person in the school every day. The model is a way of adding accountability and capacity above an existing leader, not a way of covering a vacancy more cheaply.

We often see boards reach for it as an economy measure, and it rarely lands well. If there’s nobody credible underneath, an executive head spends their two days doing the head of school’s job badly rather than doing their own job at all.

Many leaders tell us the most valuable part of the arrangement was having someone senior to think out loud with. A head of school stepping up for the first time doesn’t usually need supervision. They need somebody experienced to test a decision against at nine o’clock on a difficult morning. Where that relationship works, people grow into the job in a term.

A common misconception

“An interim executive headteacher is a cheaper way of covering a headship vacancy.”

It’s understandable that boards read it this way, because the day count is lower. But the role only works where there’s someone leading the school day to day. Without that, you haven’t bought executive leadership. You’ve bought a part time head and left three days uncovered, and the children in the school experience those three days as an absence.

Where you do have a capable head of school, the arrangement can be genuinely better than full time interim headship, because it develops your own leader instead of parking them.

Questions for proprietors and boards

• Is there someone credible leading each setting every day, or are we covering a gap with a title?
• Have we written down what the head of school decides alone?
• Who is the designated safeguarding lead in each setting, and are they present and trained?
• How many days is the executive head giving this school specifically?
• How will we know at the end whether our own leaders are stronger?

Our perspective

Interim executive headship is a good model used for the right reason. It adds experienced accountability above a leader who’s growing into a role, and it gives a group capacity it doesn’t have to appoint permanently.

It stops working the moment it becomes a way of describing a gap. The test is straightforward: if you removed the executive head tomorrow, would there still be someone leading this school? If the answer is yes, the arrangement is doing what it should. If it’s no, what you actually need is an interim headteacher, and the children in the school are better served by you calling it that.