15 October 2026
Universities across the UK are undertaking significant organisational change. Target operating model reviews, cost transformation programmes, shared services consolidation and academic portfolio reviews are reshaping how institutions operate. But while the need for transformation is clear, how universities resource that change is less consistent; in particular, are they making the most of interim leadership?
Interim appointments have an important role to play in higher education, but there is a distinction between bringing someone in to keep a function running and appointing someone specifically to deliver change. At a time when institutions are under pressure to improve financial sustainability, redesign services and rethink operating models, that distinction matters.
A familiar pattern from other sectors
This is not the first time an entire sector has had to work this out. Financial services went through something similar after 2008, when restructuring and regulatory change created sustained demand for leaders who could be deployed quickly, deliver a defined outcome, and leave. Local government and parts of the NHS have both been through comparable periods, particularly around service reconfiguration and shared services programmes.
In each case, the sector’s use of interim leadership evolved in a fairly consistent way: from short-term gap cover, brought in reactively when a role fell vacant, towards deliberate, outcome-specified appointments, brought in proactively to deliver a defined piece of change.
Higher education appears to be some way behind that curve – not absent from it, but later to it, and less consistent in how far individual institutions have moved along it.
Gap-fill still dominates
Interim appointments in Higher Education remain heavily weighted towards what might be called critical gap fill: covering a role while a permanent recruitment process runs its course, most commonly following an unexpected departure or during a restructure that hasn’t yet settled into its new shape. This is a legitimate use of interim leadership, and it isn’t going away – institutions will always have genuine short-term cover needs like this.
But it is, in a meaningful sense, the least ambitious use of the model. A gap-fill appointment is specified the way a permanent role would be: a job description, a person spec, a set of responsibilities to maintain. The interim leader’s job is essentially custodial – keep things moving until someone permanent is found.
The alternative, more established in sectors further along this curve, is to specify the appointment around a problem and an outcome rather than a role: not “we have a vacancy in this function,” but “we have this specific structural or financial problem, and we need it resolved, broadly, within this timeframe.” That distinction matters more than it might initially appear to. A role-based brief attracts and screens for a different kind of candidate than an outcome-based one – and arguably a less well-suited one for a period of active transformation.
Why the distinction matters more now than it has previously
The case for outcome-led interim appointments is strongest precisely during a period like the one the Higher Education sector is currently in. Transformation work – genuinely reshaping a cost base, an operating model, a service structure – typically benefits from leadership that has no long institutional history to protect, no future internal career to manage, and no competing responsibilities or skin in the game. It is difficult to lead a demanding change programme as an addition to an existing substantive role; it is a different proposition again to be appointed specifically, and solely, to deliver it.
This raises a genuinely open question for the sector, and one worth taking seriously rather than assuming an answer to: is higher education’s current pool of interim talent, largely drawn from within the sector itself, the right one for this kind of work?
There is a case that deep institutional and regulatory knowledge is close to a precondition for effective leadership in Higher Education, given the sector’s particular governance structures and funding environment. There is an equally serious case that the specific discipline of leading structural transformation – as distinct from leading a university department or function – is not sector-specific at all, and that institutions may be underusing leaders with that discipline drawn from outside higher education altogether, in the way other sectors did during their own periods of comparable change.
Neither position is obviously right. But the fact that the question is rarely asked explicitly, in a sector otherwise very willing to scrutinise its own practices, is itself worth noting.
The other half of the problem
It would be a mistake to place the responsibility for this solely with institutions. There is a parallel gap on the supply side. Anecdotally, and consistent with patterns observed in other sectors during earlier stages of this same shift, a significant proportion of leaders taking on interim roles in Higher Education do so as a stopgap between permanent positions, rather than as a deliberate specialism. That distinction shapes how candidates present themselves – heavily weighted towards tenure and scope of responsibility, job title, in the manner of a permanent CV – rather than towards demonstrated delivery under time pressure, which is a different and, for interim work, more relevant kind of evidence.
Sectors where interim leadership is more mature tend to have a more established professional identity around it: interim as a distinct discipline, with its own track record, rather than a temporary variant of permanent leadership. Higher Education’s interim market is not there yet, though there are signs it is moving in that direction.
A shift, out of step with itself
What makes this a genuinely interesting moment for the sector, rather than simply a criticism of current practice, is that both halves of this appear to be shifting – but not at the same pace, and not in coordination with each other. Some institutions are beginning to brief interim appointments around outcomes rather than roles. Some interim leaders are beginning to build careers explicitly around that model rather than treating it as a bridge to something permanent. But these remain the exception rather than the norm, and the two shifts don’t yet reinforce each other in the way they would need to for the sector’s use of interim leadership to fully mature.
If higher education is serious about the scale of transformation currently under way across the sector, how it resources that transformation deserves the same scrutiny as the target operating models themselves. That includes an honest look at whether interim leadership, used as most other comparable sectors now use it, is a capability the sector has yet to fully take seriously – and whether the current preference for familiar, in-sector talent pools is serving that transformation as well as it could.
Continuing the conversation
These are questions the sector is only starting to ask out loud, and they’re easier to work through in conversation than in a single article.
I’ll be at the HE Transformation Conference on 22nd October, and I’m particularly looking forward to Shan Wareing’s opening session on why institution-wide transformation is the defining leadership challenge for higher education. The scale, urgency and complexity of the change, and the decisions senior teams face on structure, sustainability, capability and future direction, are exactly where the question of how that change is resourced becomes unavoidable.
If you’re exploring how interim leadership could support your institution’s transformation, or how to position your experience as an interim leader, I’d welcome a conversation. Come say hello at the conference, or drop me a line to arrange a time to catch up at claire.lauder@andersonquigley.com.
