A teacher hands in notice in week five of a twelve-week term. The instinct is to solve the rota.
Solve the rota, obviously. But the rota is not what you are going to lose.
Treat it as a retention event
For a family, the teacher is the school. The syllabus, the building and the invoicing are yours; the relationship is theirs. When that person leaves mid-term, every parent in that class re-opens a decision they had already closed.
You have about a week before they start asking each other in the group chat what they are going to do. What they hear in that week decides most of it.
The first 48 hours
Agree the message with the departing teacher. Not a script — an agreement on what is said and when. A teacher who tells their class before you have told the parents is not being disloyal; they just have no reason to think you had a sequence in mind.
Tell parents before the students do. This is the whole game. A parent who hears it from their child on Tuesday and from you on Friday has learned that you are slow, and it colours everything that follows.
Name the replacement, or name the date you will. "We are still deciding" is the answer that loses classes. "Miss Lan takes over from the 14th, and she is sitting in on next week's class" is not.
Hand over the class, not the syllabus
The syllabus is written down. What is not written down is the part that matters:
- Which student needs to be asked directly or they will not speak.
- Which two cannot sit together.
- Whose parent wants a message after every session.
- Where the class actually is versus where the plan says it is.
Get that out of the departing teacher's head and into the student records while they are still employed and still feel warm about you. Once they have started the next job, it is gone.
Every school has lost this knowledge at least once and rediscovered it slowly, one awkward lesson at a time.
Overlap by one session if you possibly can
One session where both teachers are in the room does more than four weeks of notes. The children see a handover rather than a disappearance, and the new teacher gets to ask the questions nobody thought to write down.
If the budget for that feels hard to justify, price it against one withdrawal.
Afterwards, ask why — properly
Not in the exit interview, where you will get "a great opportunity". Ask a month later, informally. The real answers are usually about hours, or about a specific thing that happened, and both are fixable before they cost you the next person.
Contracts with expiry dates and staff records live in one place in Schoolory — see the campuses and people guide.