A new Head inherits more than a school

A new Head joins a school with plenty to learn and a steep learning curve.

The strategy. The finances. The personalities. The history behind decisions that make little sense until someone explains what happened five years ago.

They also inherit a board.

And what matters may not be what the governance handbook says that board does. It may be what the board has gradually learned to regard as normal.

• A parent contacts a trustee about a teacher. The trustee calls the Head.
• A board member with financial expertise starts working directly with the business office.
• An operational decision creates some parent opposition, so several trustees ask whether it might be reconsidered.

None of this necessarily feels unusual, and that's the problem.

Every board has an operating system

Boards develop habits.

Some are explicit: committee structures, meeting schedules, delegated authorities and reporting requirements.

Others may be practices that aren't formally written down.

Who contacts whom. What gets brought to the board. How individual trustees use their influence. Whether disagreement stays inside the boardroom. How much operational detail trustees expect to see. What happens when a parent approaches a board member privately.

Do something often enough and it stops feeling like a choice. It becomes simply how the board works.

That presents an incoming Head with an awkward governance problem. Unless the whole board is also new, they aren't joining a blank slate. Most trustees were there before them. They have governed together, developed relationships and accumulated shared assumptions about appropriate board behaviour.

The new Head is the newcomer. When the Head encounters something that looks like inappropriate board involvement, saying so carries considerable risk. The board may not perceive the behaviour as interference. Perhaps it experiences it as normal.

The transition creates an unusual opportunity

The obvious response is governance training. It's something I run regularly, whether for new boards, new directors or as a periodic reset, and it has its place. But beginning a new Board-Head relationship by explaining governance boundaries to established trustees before they've had reason to question their habits is unlikely to be particularly effective. It may lead to a delicate conversation.

It also frames the problem badly. The question isn't whether the board has been governing correctly up to now. It's whether the Head and board share the same assumptions about how they intend to work together from here.

A leadership transition creates a rare opportunity to find out.

Every new Head expects to spend their first months learning how the school works. The board should probably do something similar.

Not because it is new, but because the relationship is. The same window opens when a new Chair arrives, or when enough trustees turn over at once. Then too, the relationship is new, and with it comes the licence to renegotiate how it works.

Rather than waiting for governance assumptions to surface during the first serious disagreement, the Head and board can make them visible while there is still nothing to fight about.

Don't start with roles. Start with situations.

Most boards can agree quickly, in principle, that the board governs and the Head manages. The agreement often lasts until something actually happens: the stress test.

Imagine instead that an early session between the Head and board begins with a few situations, a chance to run the stress test while the stakes are still low.

• A parent approaches a trustee with a complaint about a teacher. What happens next?
• Several trustees independently hear similar concerns. When does that become useful board information?
• A trustee strongly disagrees with an operational decision. What should they do?
• A board member has professional expertise that could help solve a school problem. How should it be offered?
• A decision creates significant opposition among parents. What does board support for the Head look like then?

These aren't particularly complicated scenarios, which is precisely why they are useful.

The discussion begins to reveal the board's actual operating assumptions. The answers tend to sound like these:

Now there is something useful to discuss. The scenarios have made the invisible visible.

It's the conversation I run with newly appointed Heads and their boards in the first term: an hour or two, built around situations like these, ending in an agreement they take into their minutes.

The important move is from normal to agreed

When an established practice surfaces, the incoming Head doesn't need to declare it poor governance. Instead there is a much more useful question:

That question does something subtle. It separates history from intention.

“This is how we have always done it” is valuable information about the board's history. It is not, by itself, an argument for continuing to do it.

Some practices will survive examination. Others probably won't.

Practices can change without requiring trustees to conclude that everything they previously did was wrong. The board is establishing how a new governance relationship will work, not conducting a trial of the old one.

That distinction matters. A board that feels accused defends itself; a board invited to make its assumptions explicit can examine them.

The Head needs boundaries too

There is an important danger here. A Head who wants the board to stay out of operations can make almost anything sound operational.

Good governance doesn't require a passive board. Trustees should ask difficult questions. They should scrutinise evidence, challenge assumptions and hold the Head accountable. Sometimes they should make the Head uncomfortable.

Any agreement about how the board will work should constrain both sides. The board agrees not to turn individual parent concerns into trustee casework. The Head agrees not to use “operational” as a shield against legitimate scrutiny.

Trustees bring knowledge and perspective without assuming individual executive authority. The Head provides sufficient information for meaningful oversight. Disagreement is expected inside the boardroom without creating competing sources of authority outside it.

This isn't about protecting the Head from the board. It's about making the relationship governable.

Someone has to convene this

None of this happens on its own. Someone has to call the session, and the Head is the one person who can't safely do it alone. They're the newcomer, and asking a board to examine its habits can sound like criticism before it sounds like collaboration.

The Chair is the natural convenor: the one trustee whose relationship with the Head is reciprocal rather than collective, who hears what trustees say in corridors, and who the Head can talk to without every conversation becoming a meeting. The invitation works best when the Chair makes it, framed as a conversation about how this board and this Head will work together, not a review of how the board has been working.

When the Chair is part of the pattern that needs examining, or the board is long-established and settled in its habits, a neutral outsider can convene instead. Someone outside the board's history can ask questions no one inside the room can raise without cost.

Not every board accepts the invitation. A board that won't examine how it works is telling the new Head something worth knowing early. The conversation can still happen one-to-one with the Chair, where much of the relationship is maintained anyway.

One question can change the conversation

There is also a much smaller practice that can begin immediately.

Consider a group of parents complaining about a new timetable. The operational question might be: should the school change the timetable?

But there may be legitimate governance questions underneath it:

• Are we satisfied that the implementation risks were properly considered?
• Is there evidence that the problem is more significant than leadership believes?
• Does this reveal something that affects a strategic commitment the board has made?

The board doesn't have to ignore what it hears. It has to learn what to do with what it hears. That's a very different discipline.

The first 90 days are therefore about more than induction

New Heads are routinely encouraged to listen before acting, and there is good reason for that. But listening should include the governance system they have inherited. Not simply its bylaws, committee structures and delegations.

Its habits.

What reaches the board. What receives its attention. How trustees respond when stakeholders approach them. Where challenge happens. How authority is exercised. Which behaviours have become normal without ever becoming explicit.

Those first months offer something that becomes much harder to create later: a legitimate reason to examine all of this before anyone is defending a position.

The Head and board can use that window to establish a small number of explicit ways of working and test them against the situations they know will eventually come.

An agreement like that needs three things to survive: it has to be written down, it needs a review date, and every trustee who joins later has to be brought into it. Three months in, and again after the first genuinely difficult situation, is soon enough to catch what is reverting. Without that, a few appointments down the line, the explicit ways of working have quietly become habits again.

Because the worst time to discover that the Head and board have fundamentally different ideas about their respective roles is when both believe the other has just crossed a line.

A new Head inevitably inherits the board's governance culture. They do not have to inherit it unquestioned.