交接是一份档案，不是一次谈话。

A counsellor resigns and the office does what every office does. A meeting is arranged, the list is divided among whoever has capacity, and the departing person spends an afternoon talking through the difficult ones. Everybody nods. On Monday the person receiving the cases discovers that the afternoon covered six students out of thirty-one.

The problem is not the notice period. It is that the knowledge holding those cases together was never in the system in the first place, and a handover cannot transfer what was never recorded.

What actually walks out.

• What the family was promised, in the words it was promised in, including the promises made on the phone.
• Why a decision was taken: why this course rather than that one, why the deposit was delayed, why the institution was chased twice.
• Who the real contact is at an institution, as opposed to the address on the website.
• Which students need handling carefully and why, which is exactly the thing nobody writes down.
• The informal arrangements: the admissions officer who answers quickly, the local agreement about a fee that is not in any document.

The fourth item is the one that produces complaints. A new counsellor who does not know that a family has already been let down once will treat the next delay as routine, and the family will not.

Write the handover into the cases, not into a document.

A separate handover document is read once and then never again, and it ages immediately. The work is better done inside each case, so that the context is where somebody will actually find it: in the record they open when the student calls.

1. 01One note per live case, written by the departing counsellor, saying where it stands, what was promised, what happens next and what the risk is.
2. 02Every verbal commitment made to a family written into the case as a commitment, with the date it was made.
3. 03Contacts moved out of a personal mailbox and into the institution record.
4. 04Every case reassigned to a named person before the last day, with nothing left owned by a departing account.

The difference between the two approaches shows up in the first week. A document sits unread in a shared folder while the person who inherited the cases works out of an inbox; a note written into the case is on the screen at the moment the student calls. Same information, written once, and only one of the two places gets opened.

Somebody has to check.

A handover that is not verified is a handover that happened in theory. The check is not long: a manager opens a sample of the reassigned cases and asks whether, reading only the record, they could take a call from that family this afternoon.

Cases that fail the test go back for a fortnight of attention while the person who knows them is still employed. This is the whole value of a notice period and most agencies spend it on something else.

Tell the students.

A family that finds out their counsellor has left because a different name replies to an email has learned something about the agency it will not unlearn. A short message from the office naming the new counsellor, saying the case has been reviewed, and giving a specific next step costs nothing and closes the gap.

The message should come from the office rather than from the departing person, because it is the office that is continuing to be responsible.

The version of this that is not an emergency.

Everything above is easier if cases are recorded that way normally, which is the real argument for it. An office where the record holds what was promised and why does not have handover as a distinct event. It has a reassignment, which takes an hour.

The departure is simply the moment an office discovers which of those two it has been running.