Succession Planning Under the ARC-PA Sixth Edition

Search the ARC-PA Standards, Sixth Edition for a standard called succession planning and you will not find one. Programs still get asked about it, and programs still get cited when a leadership change goes badly. The expectation is real; it is just distributed across several standards rather than stated in one place, which is why it can feel vague right up until the moment a program is out of compliance. This article covers where the requirement actually lives, what a leadership vacancy sets in motion, and the difference between a plan a program has written and a plan a program can execute. It is part of our Building, Growing & Leading a PA Program pillar.

The material here comes from a November 2025 webinar by MACS consultants Drs. Tina Butler and Jennifer Eames, who did the work of assembling a scattered expectation into something a program can act on.

Written to the ARC-PA Standards, Sixth Edition (effective September 1, 2025). Last reviewed August 2026.

What is succession planning, and is ARC-PA expecting turnover?

No. Succession planning is not an exit plan and it is not a prediction that leadership is leaving. It is the proactive work of ensuring that leadership continues and that critical roles stay covered, by identifying and developing potential successors inside the program or institution before anyone needs them.

Three things it is not, since each of these is a common misreading. It is not a signal that a director is expected to depart. It is not an emergency response triggered by a sudden vacancy, because by then it is too late to be a plan. And it does not put the burden of transition on one person, which is close to the opposite of the point.

The framing Butler and Eames used in their webinar is the one worth keeping: if you are in a leadership role, or hope to be, you should begin training your replacement on day one. That turns succession planning into stewardship. A leader is building something intended to outlast their own tenure, and the plan is how that intention becomes structural.

Why is ARC-PA emphasizing this now?

Because PA education is in a period of high leadership churn while the number of accredited programs keeps growing. New programs continue to launch, which draws experienced leaders out of the existing pool, and a meaningful share of programs are operating with a vacant or recently changed director position at any given time.

From an accreditation standpoint, leadership instability creates a predictable set of exposures. Decision-making authority develops gaps. Required reporting gets delayed. Institutional knowledge leaves with the person who held it. And findings cascade, because one missed obligation in a transition tends to produce several related ones.

There is a second signal in ARC-PA's emphasis that programs sometimes miss. The expectation does not rest on the program director alone. Sponsoring institutions share accountability for leadership continuity, and a program cannot demonstrate compliance if institutional leadership is unaware of or unprepared for a transition.

Historically, PA programs ran on long-tenured directors who served as the single point of knowledge and authority. That model felt normal for decades. It no longer matches what the standards ask a program to demonstrate, and honestly, most of us have lived through a few days of chaos when the one person who knew how something worked was suddenly unavailable. Succession planning is the structural answer to that experience.

Which standards actually carry the expectation?

Two families. The A standards explain why succession planning matters, and the E standards explain when it becomes urgent.

The A standards are where most of the useful reflection happens. A1.02c pushes an institution past "is the program director doing their job" toward harder questions: who steps in if the director leaves or is unexpectedly absent, how leadership effectiveness is evaluated in a way that reflects PA program requirements rather than a generic university instrument, and who at the institutional level actually understands the program's leadership structure.

The A2 standards make a related point by accumulation. Read the full list of what a program director is responsible for and the conclusion is unavoidable: no one person can or should carry all of it. Which means succession planning starts with three questions about the current team. Who else understands the operational, administrative, and compliance domains? Where are responsibilities already being shared? And who could realistically step into an interim or permanent role with the right mentoring?

Why do transitions produce cascading citations?

Because the E-standard clocks run in business days and a transition sets several obligations in motion at once.

Consider the sequence. A director resigns. Notification is due within two business days. An interim appointment is due within five. Meanwhile the ARC-PA Portal needs a submitter who is already authorized, official contacts have to change, the program website has to be updated to reflect current leadership, and recruitment reporting begins. None of these steps is difficult in isolation. All of them are easy to miss when responsibility is unclear and the program is simultaneously absorbing the operational shock of losing its director.

These timelines are not flexible. A program that has to request portal access after the vacancy occurs will miss the first deadline while it waits, and every downstream obligation slips behind that one. This is the mechanism behind what Butler and Eames call cascading citations: a finding under one standard producing several related findings, which together carry real weight in an accreditation decision.

The failure is almost never negligence. It is unclear ownership and access that was never established in advance.

What separates a written plan from an operational one?

Whether you could implement it tomorrow.

ARC-PA expects a succession plan to be documented, institutionally supported, and ready for immediate implementation. The written document should be specific about who assumes leadership if the director is unexpectedly absent, how interim leadership gets appointed, what role the institution plays in hiring and onboarding, how the program will recruit internally and externally, and what the transition timeline looks like. Timelines should carry actual timeframes rather than nebulous intentions. ARC-PA is looking for clarity, not placeholders.

What sinks programs is usually not the absence of the document. It is the absence of the operational details behind it.

Portal access. More than one person should hold ARC-PA Portal access before a transition. Access is not automatic, not even for institutional officials, and it has to be requested in advance. If the director is suddenly unavailable, someone else must already be authorized to submit required forms and notifications.

Communication channels. Shared or departmental email accounts prevent information from siloing with one individual. When responsibilities shift, correspondence and deadlines stay visible.

Knowledge transfer. Critical documents, calendars, reporting schedules, and institutional contacts should not live exclusively with one person. The plan should include a straightforward process for handing over both the records and the administrative responsibilities.

Website and public information. Program websites are a routine source of compliance findings. Leadership changes, interim appointments, and contact information need prompt updates, and outdated pages tend to go unnoticed internally until a reviewer notices them externally.

An operational plan anticipates each of these and assigns responsibility for it in advance.

Who should be involved?

At minimum, everyone named in the plan and the senior institutional officials responsible for program oversight. Ideally the broader leadership team knows the plan exists and roughly what it says.

Succession planning works best when it is transparent and normalized rather than treated as confidential or reactive. Keeping it quiet reinforces the idea that leadership continuity is the director's private problem, which is the assumption the standards are pushing programs away from.

How do you develop leaders before you need them?

Deliberately, and well ahead of any transition. Naming an interim director is the minimum. The more valuable work is identifying people with leadership potential and growing them over time: assessing individual strengths and interests, providing mentorship and leadership training, increasing responsibility gradually, and paying attention to how people handle expanded roles.

The most practical mechanism Butler and Eames recommended is the assistant director role. Positions with real delegated responsibility for didactic education, clinical education, assessment, or operations do two jobs at once. They build leadership capacity through actual practice rather than theory, and they reduce the unsustainable load a single director otherwise carries. That second effect is worth stating plainly, because it means succession planning pays for itself even in a program where no transition is on the horizon. It distributes work, creates mentorship, and strengthens the team.

It also connects directly to faculty sufficiency. A program that has distributed leadership responsibility has a stronger case to make under Standard C1.02, and a program that has documented how it prices administrative roles has most of the workload analysis already built.

The point is stability, not pessimism

Succession planning is closer to an insurance policy than to anticipating failure. It exists so that when the unexpected happens, disruption stays small.

Programs with real plans protect students from interruption, reduce institutional risk, hold compliance through a transition, and demonstrate the kind of foresight that reads well in every part of an accreditation review. Under the Sixth Edition, ARC-PA is signaling that leadership continuity matters both for accreditation and for the long-term health of PA education.

Our thanks to Drs. Tina Butler and Jennifer Eames for their work clarifying this. If your program is facing a transition, or would rather build the plan before it faces one, talk to our team.

Frequently asked questions

Which ARC-PA standards require a succession plan?
No single standard is labeled succession planning. The expectation sits across A1.02c, which makes the sponsoring institution responsible for ensuring effective program leadership, the A2.07 through A2.09 standards defining program director responsibilities, and the E standards governing transition reporting: E1.08a for vacancy notification, E1.07a-b for interim appointment, and E1.05 for recruitment updates.

How quickly must a PA program report a program director vacancy to ARC-PA?
Within two business days under E1.08a, followed by appointment of an interim program director within five business days under E1.07a-b, which also limits how long an interim may serve. E1.05 then requires ongoing updates on recruitment. These windows are not flexible.

What should a PA program succession plan include?
Who assumes leadership if the director is unexpectedly absent, how interim leadership is appointed, the institution's role in hiring and onboarding, internal and external recruitment strategy, and a transition timeline with specific timeframes rather than general intentions.

Why do leadership transitions cause multiple ARC-PA citations?
Because a vacancy triggers several obligations at once on short business-day clocks. Portal access, official notifications, website updates, and recruitment reporting all come due together, and a delay in one produces delays in the others. Programs that have not pre-authorized portal access for a second person typically miss the first deadline while requesting it.

How do assistant director roles support succession planning?
They develop leadership capacity in practice rather than in theory. Delegating a defined area such as didactic education, clinical education, assessment, or operations gives a future leader real responsibility, creates a mentorship relationship, and reduces the load carried by a single program director at the same time.

Deciding whether to bring in outside help during a transition is its own question. See How to Work with an Accreditation Consultant.