The same candidate applied to one of my schools twice. The first time, I didn’t shortlist them. Three years later, I hired them and they quickly became one of the strongest members of the team. Around the same time, I was supporting an experienced but struggling head of department. They had, by all accounts (including some off the record from trusted peers), hit the ground running and been exceptional at their previous school. Strong outcomes, trusted relationships, the kind of reputation that travels ahead of the reference. But when they joined us, they took several years to find their footing.
In neither case was there evidence of dramatic change in those individuals over the intervening period. No significant qualification gained, no major promotion or demotion, no shift in personal circumstance or motivation. The variable was developmental, as you might expect, but not of the people. Of the school. Neither was a bad appointment per se and both were (and still are) very good at what they do. It was a question of timing. For one candidate, I had made the right call on when to bring them in. For the other, I had not.
The nature of our industry is unusual. Regardless of the geography, ownership structure or corporate culture behind them, individual schools are generally values-driven institutions, and educators are values-driven individuals. This is what makes fit so important on both sides of every recruitment and selection process.
A teacher considering an international move is not focused on whether the commute works or how long the holidays are. They are asking whether this is a school they believe in, whether the philosophy is one they share, whether the culture is one in which they will feel at home. Conventional recruiting wisdom runs in the same direction: look for cultural fit, for someone whose educational philosophy maps onto your guiding statements, for a pedagogical approach that will work for your students.
So, both parties arrive at the interview ready to tread the same ground. The conversation inevitably centres on values, philosophy, approach to teaching and learning, pastoral instincts, the obligatory but often underestimated safeguarding question. Practicalities are largely relegated to the candidate’s questions at the end of the interview, or to the negotiations that follow an offer.
There is one variable that is rarely given the consideration it deserves. In founding schools it is romanticised, with its challenges minimised or overlooked entirely. Beyond those early years, it hardly features in hiring conversations at all, and yet that is when its effects on the teaching body are most visible.
Around year three, leaders in newer schools often spot something interesting happening. Some of the superstars of the founding team seem to have gone off the boil, and some of the school’s biggest detractors are becoming its champions. As with my own hiring calls, proper investigation usually leads to the same conclusion: the people themselves have not changed. The distinguishing variable is the conditions they find themselves in.
Schools move through recognisable phases of development, and what each asks of its people can be radically different. Someone who thrives as part of a small founding team can struggle as they start to feel like a cog in a much larger machine a couple of years later. Meanwhile, across the staff room, a colleague who was frustrated by the lack of structure and pace of change in the early years is starting to feel much more comfortable as the school matures and their favourite seat is feeling nicely worn in.
In the sections below, I describe each phase in turn: the conditions it creates, what it asks of its people, and what both candidates and those making appointments should be prioritising. Year ranges are a rough guide, but note that growth rates vary. One school entering its fourth year of operation may still feel like a founding institution, while another of the same age is approaching maturity. What defines each phase is the conditions it creates, not the date the school first opened its doors.
Founding (Year 0–1)
A founding school has either no systems at all, or systems written before anyone had spent a day in the building. Often both. The documentation the team is working from has usually been borrowed from another school or built from the collective experience of the founding team. Regardless, it is understood to be provisional, waiting to be tested against what the school actually turns out to be.
As a leader at any level, you cannot stay in your lane. Things outside your expertise or preference will regularly land on your desk. The team is too small for narrow specialisms, and the environment is too fluid for rigid job descriptions. And in the absence of institutional memory, operational and strategic decisions alike are often being made for the first time. When a relationship breaks down in a team this size, there is no institutional distance to absorb it.
Everyone in a founding school has a view on what it should become, and in an environment this fluid, most can influence it. That energy is galvanising. A small group of people who are all invested in the outcome, thinking hard about the same questions at the same time, is not something you find in many working environments. But competing interpretations of the vision are the norm in the first year or two. The ability to engage with that noise without being paralysed by it or dismissive of it is, in my experience, the quality that separates founding appointments that work from those that do not.
What a founding school needs in its leaders goes beyond the ability to manage in the absence of reliable infrastructure. It requires an appetite for it. Building something from nothing is an experience some professionals find energising and others find corrosive. Most candidates underestimate how binary the outcome usually is.
People romanticise being part of a founding team, and in many ways the rose-tinted glasses are justified. But the daily reality often feels more like a grind than a dynamic startup: uncertainty, false starts, decisions made with inadequate information that never please everyone and sometimes satisfy no one. Operating in such an environment needs to be wanted, not merely accepted, before you consider applying to join a school in its founding years.
Building (Year 2–3)
By years two and three, the school usually has foundations but is in rapid growth. Staff and student numbers can double inside a year. The culture established at founding shifts as the community changes, and this is also the period when founding assumptions are tested by reality most directly. The demographics of the student body that arrives may not match what the school anticipated, and in many markets that gap is growing.
This can be seen in action in Singapore, where I have spent most of my time since 2020. There has been a clear pattern over recent years of a declining western expatriate population and growing immigration from elsewhere in Asia, particularly mainland China. This, combined with a growing appetite amongst Chinese families to send their children abroad for their schooling, has driven a significant uptick in applications to Singapore’s international schools. An admissions market that was once one of the world’s most diverse is increasingly dominated by a much narrower demographic. New students bring different cultural expectations and educational needs, particularly around English language proficiency.
For established schools, the demographic shift is arriving gradually. With their existing, diverse student bodies, the change registers at the margins and can be managed strategically. Building schools have no such buffer. By definition, the majority of their students are products of the new admissions landscape. For many of these schools, the planning took place before the shift accelerated during and after the COVID pandemic. The market they find themselves in may be very different to the one they were originally set up for.
Even for schools not having to adapt to such unanticipated changes, the building phase exerts predictable pressures. As classes fill and policies begin to be codified to reflect the new scale, the flexibility of the early days starts to fade. Some staff will find the adjustment difficult and will make that known. For those who joined for the startup adventure, the growth registers as loss rather than progress.
A leader joining a building school walks into a phase that rewards a quality that is easy to underestimate: the discipline to complete and improve what exists, without the urge to start over. One who arrives and instinctively reaches for their previous school’s playbook tends to mistake imperfect or incomplete for failed, and ends up rebuilding what only needed finishing. The staff they join are often invested in what exists, and they can tell the difference between someone who has come to help them finish it and someone who thinks it needs to be fixed. That distinction matters more than new leaders expect.
The building phase suits a specific kind of leader: one who finds real satisfaction in consolidation, can work through stretches where progress is real but not always visible, and does not need the energy of creation to stay motivated. Schools recruiting at this stage sometimes reach for a founding-era profile out of habit or ambition. That is usually a mismatch. The candidate who belongs here knows the difference between creating something and seeing it through, and wants the latter.
Transition (Year 4–5)
By years four and five, schools are often approaching capacity, and a different order of problem begins to surface. The systems that had been effective in a growing, more agile institution are reaching their limits. Issues that were previously dismissed as teething pains start to feel structural.
The staff who have been there since the beginning feel this phase most sharply. They arrived when the school was small enough for everyone to know what it stood for. They have lived through the rapid growth of the building phase, and now spend their break times talking about how things have changed. Founding-era memories grow rosier with distance, and the school as it existed in year one becomes an increasingly appealing point of comparison. Some will raise the question of direction openly. Most will only bring it up at the bar on a Friday night.
What transition demands, more than any other phase, is diagnostic capability. It is not the same as operational execution, and not every leader possesses it. The skill is reading whether a process needs adjusting or a system needs rethinking. Enacting systematic change while colleagues push for something faster or simpler is where the phase tests you. That judgement is just as important, and harder to find.
A leader joining a transition school needs to want the diagnostic work itself, not the narrative of having helped a school evolve. The day-to-day reality is rarely dramatic: the iterative, patient work of identifying what is structurally wrong and building something better, inside a school running at full capacity. It is also the phase in which experience of a more established school is most directly useful. In the early days, that experience can be a liability. Here, recent experience of functioning systems working at scale gives a leader something concrete to build toward.
That said, schools and governing bodies must resist the temptation to hire a change manager rather than a leader. The diagnostic and systematic work is important, but so is everything else. The change programme sits on top of a full leadership role, not in place of one. That makes recruiting and selecting new leaders in this phase more challenging than people often realise.
Stable (Year 6 onwards)
Most schools, by year six and beyond, have a settled identity. Systems are established, roles are clearly defined, and the institutional infrastructure is in place. This is worth stating as a positive rather than a consolation prize. A stable school can offer depth of practice that is difficult to achieve in earlier phases: coaching and mentorship structures that have had time to develop properly, and enough stability to build expertise over time. Staff turnover at this stage comes from natural attrition, not growth. The culture is more stable as a result, and colleagues are more likely to know each other well (though a sustained morale problem will disrupt that quickly).
That stability also shapes the development cycle. Where earlier phases are perpetually interrupted by carry-over from the previous year or emergent issues, a more stable school can often be more deliberate about its priorities. That leaves room for the sustained projects and longer-horizon work that other phases rarely allow. That said, stability is not a one-way door. A mature school undergoing significant change in ownership, leadership direction, or student profile can find itself back in transitional territory regardless of how long it has been operating.
The staff a new leader joins in a stable school tend to be experienced, settled, and broadly invested in things remaining as they are. They have watched initiatives arrive with ambition and fade without trace, and they have developed a quiet immunity to them. A leader with a love of innovation for its own sake will find this a significant constraint. Most of the team have seen enough initiatives not survive the year to know that patience usually wins.
Earlier phases each generate their own kind of urgency for an incoming leader: the absent systems, the growth that cannot keep pace with itself, the structural problems that have waited too long. A stable school has none of these. That makes its demands less immediately legible, and easier to underestimate. The work is to sustain and deepen what exists: keeping standards high in a context that already functions, improving at the margins of something established, without the highly visible forward movement that characterised the founding years.
For a leader making their first move into international education, the stable school is also likely to be the phase that most closely resembles what they already know, which counts for more in one’s first year abroad than is usually acknowledged. The honest question for any candidate is whether they will find that environment energising, or feel the need to manufacture urgency where none exists. Staying motivated and effective in the absence of that forcing function is harder than most candidates anticipate. The risk for recruiters is reaching for someone whose instinct is to transform, when what the phase needs is someone who can sustain and deepen. The profile that belongs here finds genuine satisfaction in depth and refinement, and does not need the school to be a project.
Making the right decision
Schools do not always have an accurate view of the phase they are in, and the misrepresentations, whether accidental or deliberate, tend to run in predictable directions. Some founding schools well into their second year will still recruit as though they are starting from scratch. Some stable schools will describe themselves as dynamic because stability feels like an uncomfortable thing to advertise. Some transition schools will lead with the excitement of the challenge without being direct about how systemic the problems are. A candidate’s due diligence should include reading the phase independently rather than taking the school’s own account at face value. There are usually signals available: the tenure of longstanding staff, the state of documentation and procedure, the way leadership talks about what it is building versus what it is managing.
Candidates, equally, do not always reflect enough on which phases they are suited to, and which they are not. Phase rarely features in interview preparation, and the people doing the hiring do not always raise it either. More significant is the number of candidates who are confident about which kind of school suits them and discover, once inside it, that they were wrong. That realisation arrives faster than expected and carries a cost for everyone involved. The self-knowledge required is more demanding than it sounds, and an honest conversation with colleagues who have observed you working under pressure or uncertainty will usually tell you more than your own instinct will.
The question is not simply whether this is the right person for the school, or the right school for the person. It is whether they have found each other at the right moment.