What to Include in an Interim Headteacher Brief

A practical guide for proprietors, boards and trustees appointing interim leadership

Most boards write a brief for a permanent headteacher without thinking twice about it. Job description, person specification, candidate pack, the lot. Then they appoint an interim on the strength of a phone call and half an email.

It’s understandable. Interim appointments usually happen under pressure, and writing things down feels like a luxury when the school needs someone by Monday. But many proprietors tell us the same thing three months later: the placement drifted, and nobody could quite say what it had been for.

A brief takes about an hour to write. It’s the single cheapest thing you can do to make an interim placement work, and it’s the thing most often skipped.

Why does an interim headteacher need a written brief?

A permanent headteacher has years to work out what matters. An interim has weeks, and they’re doing it in a school where they don’t know the history, the people or the informal rules.

Without a brief, an experienced interim will make sensible decisions. The problem is that they may not be your decisions. They’ll prioritise what looks most urgent from the outside, which isn’t always what the board is most worried about.

There’s a second reason, and it matters more than boards expect. A brief gives you something to review against. When you sit down in week eight and ask how the placement is going, a written brief turns that from an impression into a conversation about specific things. Without one, you’re comparing the interim against a picture in your head that they never saw.

It also protects the interim. A leader who can point to an agreed set of priorities is far better placed to push back when the school starts adding things to their week.

What should an interim headteacher brief include?

Half a page to two pages is plenty. Nine things earn their place.

1. Why the vacancy exists. Be honest about this. If the previous head left after a difficult period, say so. An interim who discovers the real story in week two from a member of staff has lost time and some trust.

2. What the placement must achieve. Three or four objectives, no more. “Stabilise safeguarding leadership”, “close the outstanding compliance actions”, “get the improvement plan moving again”, “support the board through the permanent recruitment”. If you can’t name three, you’re not ready to appoint.

3. Delegated authority. This is the one boards skip and regret. What can the interim decide alone? What needs board approval? Spending limits, staffing decisions, contract signing, changes to provision, communication with commissioners and parents. Vague authority means either paralysis or a decision you didn’t want.

4. Reporting lines. Who does the interim report to, how often, and in what form. One named person, not a committee and not a group chat.

5. Duration and review points. A start date, an expected end date, and at least two review points in between. For a special school this usually maps neatly onto the half term rhythm. Six weeks and mid term work well.

6. Days and pattern. How many days a week, which days, and what happens if the setting needs more. Also whether board meetings, INSET and out of hours work are included.

7. Safeguarding arrangements. Who currently holds the designated safeguarding lead role, whether the interim is taking it, and what’s open. This should be confirmed in writing in week one alongside a proper safeguarding handover.

8. What they’re walking into. Current inspection position, any regulatory correspondence, live complaints, staffing issues, financial pressure. Everything they’d find out anyway, given to them on day one rather than week four.

9. Handover expectations. What the interim should leave behind, and for whom. A written position statement for the incoming permanent head is worth asking for at the start, not remembering at the end.

What should you leave out?

A brief goes wrong when it becomes a wish list.

Leave out anything you’d expect a competent headteacher to do anyway. You don’t need to brief someone to lead safeguarding well or to line manage the senior team. Briefing the obvious dilutes the things that actually matter.

Leave out the long term. An interim isn’t rewriting your three year vision, and asking them to will produce something the permanent head quietly abandons.

Leave out grievances about the previous head. Context is helpful. A settling of scores isn’t, and it puts the interim in an awkward position with staff who liked their predecessor.

And leave out anything you’re not actually prepared to give them authority to do. An objective without the authority to deliver it is a set up.

How specific should the objectives be?

Specific enough to know whether they happened.

“Improve safeguarding” isn’t reviewable. “Complete a safeguarding audit, close the actions from the last independent review, and give the board a written assessment of safeguarding culture by half term” is.

That doesn’t mean writing a project plan. It means each objective should have something you could point at in eight weeks and say yes or not yet.

From our experience

The briefs that work best are short. We often see boards produce a six page document that reads like a permanent job description, and the interim politely reads it once. A page that names three things and sets out what the interim can decide will shape a placement far more.

The most common gap by a long way is delegated authority. Many leaders tell us they spent their first fortnight unable to make routine decisions because nobody had said whether they could. Meanwhile the board thought things were moving. Both sides were being reasonable and nothing was happening.

The second pattern is boards briefing a symptom rather than a cause. A school brings in an interim to “sort out behaviour”, and by week three it’s clear the behaviour picture is really a curriculum and staffing picture. Schools that recover well usually build a review point in early enough for the brief to be adjusted rather than quietly ignored.

A common misconception

“An experienced interim will know what to do without being told.”

They usually will know what a school in that condition needs. What they can’t know is what your board is most worried about, what has already been tried, what the proprietor will and won’t accept, and which of the many things that need doing you’d put first.

Briefing an experienced leader isn’t a lack of trust. It’s giving them the context they’d otherwise spend three weeks assembling, which is three weeks the children in the school don’t have to spare.

Questions for boards and proprietors

• Can we name the three things this placement must achieve, and would the interim recognise them?
• Have we said what they can decide without coming back to us, in figures?
• Who is their single point of contact, and do they know it’s them?
• Have we told them honestly why the vacancy exists?
• When are our review points, and are they in the diary?

Our perspective

A brief isn’t paperwork. It’s the difference between an interim period that leaves a school stronger and one that simply keeps the building open.

Schools that come through leadership change well almost always did this bit properly. They spent an hour getting clear about what they needed, they gave their interim the authority to deliver it, and they checked in at agreed points rather than hoping.

The children in the school get one term regardless of how well the placement was set up. An hour spent writing the brief is what decides whether that term counts for them.