A similar question and answer:

http://mail.template-toolkit.org/pipermail/templates/2005-February/007239.html

It's about wrapper templates but can be easily adapted to separate header and footer. Here is the content of the message:

Andy Wardley
Tue, 22 Feb 2005 08:36:21 +0000


Jonathan Tweed wrote:
I have a template toolkit object that automatically adds
a wrapper to the processed template. Is there any way to
override this on a particular call to process so that
the wrapper does not get added?

You can use a META tag to disable it.

For example, in your wrapper:

  [% IF template.naked;
        content;
     ELSE;
        content WRAPPER site/wrapper;
     END
  %]

Then in your template you can add a tag like this to
disable the WRAPPER:

  [% META naked=1 %]
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