Dismissing employee in probationary period....

Does the individual have any protective characteristics?
If no, then the commercial risks are low.

You can invite employee in for a formal probationary review, refer to the job profile/spec, have clear evidence of where they are not performance targets/KPIs & discuss where they should be at by now... etc
You can then put them on an improvement plan (give a timeframe). If no improvement, you can then follow up & terminate them.

Alternatively, you can skip the second step and just invite them in for a formal probationary review and explain to them it’s not working out with clear reasons why. It’s generally advised to have the second step so there’s no risks for “wrongful dismissal.”

The clue was in the title and in 90+ % of cases this is what happens

Invite to meeting including some details of your concern and potential outcome
Hold meeting
Confirm decision and offer right to appeal

In 99% of cases there is no appeal

Why do it?

Natural justice
Alerts you to potential problems
ACAS Code says you ought to
Not doing it and then being found to have discriminated means up to 25% extra compensation

plenty of posts on this subject

To add to Peter's advice:

Don't worry about being delicate. Be clear. Be unambiguous. Be humane. But articulate "it's just really not working out" in terms that are actually helpful. For example:

- You've managed to annoy every member of your team and none of them wants to work with you.
- You've been late to the office 3 days out of 5 for the last month.
- You don't actually have the skills you claimed to have in your interview (common one, this) and we don't have the time or the budget to get you up to speed.

I've had a few occasions when a manager has wanted to get rid of a new hire quite quickly and so I've pushed back for them to be explicit about why. Very occasionally it's because the manager is actually racist or sexist and isn't comfortable working with the employee. On those occasions, hard words have been had. More often it's because they actually wanted someone who already knew everything about our company, our market, our industry and our internal working practices and can't be bothered to wait for the new hire to get up to speed/aren't happy having their habits challenged/are convinced that the magical work fairy will bring them the perfect candidate if they just throw enough money at agents.

Most of the time when they have a legitimate reason to get rid of someone early it's actually because, basically, the hire lied in interview: "Oh, sure, I'm a whizz with [insert software platform name here]" or "Yes, I definitely have this qualification". Hiring was done in a bit of rush and time wasn't made to do pre-employment checks or do competence tests. In those cases, it's a lot easier to justify a dismissal.

Be honest! That doesn't mean delicate. If the line manager has been managing them properly it should be obvious to the individual that they are struggling. If you laid the ground rules out clearly at the start (re your probationary terms), then it won't be a surprise when you have to say goodbye.

But I don't see why YOU have to do it - that should be the line manager's job - after all he/she was the person who was responsible for them.

So - not following procedures and safeguarding procedures (which is vital in a school).. extra training was given and tried again but no improvement and actually getting worse. Myself and the line manager will hold the meeting. Lead by the manager but just wanted some advice on how to deal with it.

Have you checked ACAS? They are quite good at setting out step by step what you should do in these kinds of meetings :)

we have just set it out in a practical way having actually done it successfully thousands of times

Sorry Peter, did you mean to reply to me there? Not sure I follow. Would you not recommend ACAS then?

ACAS just has more details sometimes, with letter templates etc. - I wasn't implying your advice was sub par or anything eep

Hi Lisa

I have seen meetings go badly wrong when a manager has tried to be tactful and the poor employee hasn't understood what was being said to them. The worst time was informing someone that we would be starting redundancy consultation with them. The employee was smiling, nodding and telling the line manager what a good idea all the proposed changes were while the manager waffled on, trying not to cause upset. This is cruel. You do not want to approach this in the most delicate way; you want to approach it clearly and fairly.

You managed to express it clearly to us: not following procedures and safeguarding procedures (which is vital in a school).. extra training was given and tried again but no improvement. That is a perfectly good reason to fail someone. There is nothing wrong in saying that in those words.

What you need to do is IMA. Invite. Meeting. Appeal.It's fair, simple and Acas-compliant, as as mentioned above, you will find many threads on here about this.