The founder had set a leaving date a year out
The board of a private education group had a year’s notice. The chief executive had founded the group and set a date to leave, which gave the board enough time to run a proper handover instead of a replacement. A founder transition is delicate for reasons that have little to do with recruitment. Internal candidates are watching, and staff are attached to the person leaving.
Doing it properly means running an outside search and assessing the internal candidates on the same basis at the same time. That is hard to do credibly from inside the organization, where familiarity does most of the judging. School leadership is also a small field, so a search confined to it would have been a narrow one.
We assessed inside and outside against one framework
We ran a retained executive search outside the group and a structured assessment of the internal candidates at the same time, against the same framework. That is the point of running the two together: the board could compare people on evidence rather than on how well it knew them. We spoke with former chief executives of education groups, former principals and former board chairs to shape what the role now needed.
The external field was widened into multi site operating businesses in other sectors, because running several sites under one management is a comparable job and the education field on its own is small. Candidates cleared the Nextyn compliance framework before introduction, and confidentiality was handled carefully throughout, since the transition had not yet been announced.
The group appointed a successor with months of overlap
The group appointed a successor while the outgoing chief executive was still in post and able to support the handover. Leadership hiring at this level is judged on the year that follows rather than on the appointment itself, and the overlap is what made that year straightforward.
The internal side mattered just as much. The candidates who were not appointed were told why, and were told early, so the group kept people it valued rather than losing them to a process they could not see into.
