What to Do When an Interim Placement Is Not Working

A practical guide for proprietors, boards and trustees

Six weeks in, something isn’t right. The board can’t quite name it, staff are being polite rather than positive, and the things that were supposed to move haven’t.

It’s an uncomfortable position, and many proprietors tell us they sat on it far longer than they should have. Nobody wants to admit that an appointment made under pressure hasn’t worked, particularly when the alternative is starting again with a school that’s already unsettled.

The good news is that most of these situations are fixable, and a sizeable proportion turn out not to be problems at all. What matters is diagnosing honestly before deciding, and being willing to have a direct conversation early rather than a difficult one late.

Is it a slow start or the wrong appointment?

This is the first question, and getting it wrong in either direction is costly.

A good interim leader in a specialist setting will often look quiet for the first three to four weeks. They’re reading, listening and walking the school rather than announcing changes. That’s not inactivity. It’s the thing that makes everything afterwards work, and boards who mistake it for drift sometimes push a good interim into premature action.

By around week six, though, you should be able to see a few things. Do they know the school? Can they describe the issues accurately? Have staff started bringing them things? Is there a plan, even a rough one? Have they told you something you didn’t want to hear?

That last one is a surprisingly reliable indicator. An interim who has been in a school for six weeks and has nothing uncomfortable to report either hasn’t looked or isn’t willing to say.

Diagnose before you decide

From our experience, when a placement feels wrong the cause is usually one of five things, and only one of them is the person.

The brief was never clear. The most common cause by a distance. The interim is working on what looked most urgent from the outside, which isn’t what the board was worried about. Neither party has done anything wrong and both are frustrated.

They don’t have the authority they need. Nobody wrote down what the interim could decide alone, so they’re checking things they should be deciding, and the board reads that as a lack of grip.

The placement is under resourced. Two days a week was agreed for a job that needs four. Nothing moves, and it looks like a performance issue when it’s an arithmetic one.

The setting is resisting. Sometimes an established senior team quietly declines to be led by someone temporary. That’s a real problem, but it isn’t the interim’s failure and replacing them won’t solve it.

The appointment genuinely isn’t right. It happens. Usually it’s a setting mismatch rather than capability, a strong leader who doesn’t know this kind of provision well enough.

Four of those five are fixed by a conversation and a written adjustment. Only the fifth requires ending the placement.

Have the conversation properly

Do it early, do it directly, and do it in person.

Open by describing what you’re seeing rather than what you’ve concluded. “We expected the safeguarding audit to be under way by now and it isn’t. Help me understand where we are.” That gives the interim a chance to tell you something you don’t know, which in our experience they usually can.

Ask what’s getting in their way. Interims are frequently blocked by something the board could remove in a morning: access to a system, a member of staff who’s refusing to engage, a decision sitting unmade with the proprietor.

Then agree what changes, on both sides, and write it down with a date. Three or four weeks is usually right. If things haven’t shifted by then, you have a much clearer basis for the next decision, and so do they.

What doesn’t work is the drift. Boards that avoid this conversation for a term end up ending a placement badly, having never told the person there was a problem.

If the placement needs to end

Sometimes it does, and ending it well matters more than most boards realise.

Check the terms. Notice period, any fee implications, and what your provider will do. A good provider should be finding you a replacement rather than defending the placement.

Protect the school first. Don’t end a placement without knowing what follows. A gap after a failed interim placement is considerably worse than the placement itself, particularly for safeguarding, which cannot be left unheld for a fortnight while you regroup.

Be straight with staff. Not the detail, but enough. Staff who have watched a leader arrive and leave within a term need to hear from the board that this is being managed, or they’ll draw their own conclusions and some will start looking.

Handle it decently. Interim education leadership is a small world. How you end a placement is known within it, and it affects who’s willing to work with you next time.

Learn from it. Ask honestly whether the brief, the resourcing or the selection was the weak point. An independent review before the next appointment often answers that. If it was the brief, the next appointment will fail the same way.

What if the problem is the school?

Occasionally a board discovers, through a failing placement, that the real issue sits above or around the interim.

A proprietor who won’t delegate. A senior team that closes ranks. A governance structure where nobody can actually decide anything. These are hard things to see from the inside, and a second failed placement will usually confirm them.

Where that’s a possibility, an external review of governance is more useful than another appointment. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s cheaper than repeating the same experience twice.

From our experience

When we’re asked to look at a placement that isn’t working, it’s the brief more often than the person. A board that couldn’t name three objectives at the start finds, three months later, that the interim delivered against different ones.

The second pattern is silence. Many leaders tell us they had no idea the board was unhappy until they were told the placement was ending. Nobody had raised anything at six weeks, or at all. That’s a governance failure rather than a leadership one, and it’s entirely preventable with a scheduled review.

Schools that recover well usually have the conversation early and find it turns out to be about resourcing or authority. The placement continues and improves. That outcome is far more common than replacement, but only where somebody was willing to speak up in week six.

A common misconception

“We should give it more time before saying anything.”

It’s an understandable instinct, and it’s usually the wrong one. Waiting doesn’t make the conversation easier, it makes it harder, because by then you’ve built a case rather than raised a concern.

An interim told at six weeks that something isn’t landing can adjust. One told at the end of term that it hasn’t worked has had no chance to. And the school has spent a term without the leadership it needed, which the children in it experience as another period of things not quite working.

Raising it early isn’t a criticism. It’s how the placement gets to succeed.

Questions for proprietors and boards

• Did we give a clear written brief, and could the interim recite the three priorities?
• Have we told them what they can decide without us, in figures?
• Is the placement resourced for the job we actually need doing?
• Have we asked what’s getting in their way, or only what isn’t happening?
• If this ends, what happens to safeguarding on the following Monday?

Our perspective

Most struggling placements are recoverable, and the thing that recovers them is an honest conversation held six weeks earlier than feels comfortable.

Build a review into every placement at the start, so raising a concern is routine rather than a confrontation. Diagnose before you decide, because the brief and the authority are more often the problem than the person. And if it does need to end, end it properly, with the school covered and the staff told.

The children in your school have already been through one leadership change. They’re relying on the adults to sort the next one out quickly and calmly rather than letting it run.