Developing middle leaders

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Senior leaders and governing bodies can do much to create the right environment and opportunities for middle leaders to develop their skills. Distributed leadership, coaching and mentoring, and the Middle Leadership Development Programme will all be beneficial.

Distributed leadership

Schools need leaders throughout the school who are focused on learning. Headteachers, deputies and all those in formal leadership roles must therefore be willing to relax their personal control so that leadership can be distributed at all levels.

Occasionally, distributed leadership can be too risky, premature or inappropriate. We can see it in place in most schools, however, noting that it doesn’t just happen but has to be developed, supported and co-ordinated.

“One of the things that has driven me over the last few years is the idea of distributed leadership. Our middle leaders are at the stage where they are able to leave their teams, which function well without them, in order to join the deputy head and myself in management planning and development planning every week. The structure enables that regular communication between us.”
Mary Watts, Headteacher, Appleton CE Primary School, Abingdon

The video clip above features headteachers from primary schools discussing the importance of distributed leadership.

More about distributed leadership.

Role of the headteacher

Middle leaders need the right conditions to flourish and grow, and they need opportunities and permission to lead and to learn from one another. Structured and planned support are essential. Coaching and mentoring will be an important part of this, as will talking with middle leaders about their leadership.

To support middle leaders, headteachers might:

provide time away from classrooms to observe other lessons and monitor teaching and learning across the school
give personal and professional support through regular dialogue
provide time away from classrooms to model lessons for other staff
provide opportunities for continuing professional development, such as classroom observation and feedback, and the Middle Leadership Development Programme
earmark funding from the budget for resources
establish systems and structures for communicating, planning, monitoring and modelling

Headteachers will have accumulated their own leadership skills over time and need to create the opportunities for their middle leaders to do the same.

More about the importance of headteacher support, including a short video.

Narrowing the gap and reducing within-school variation

Within-school variation is concerned with inconsistency in the quality of pupils’ learning experiences. It is now recognised that the variation in performance between pupils in a particular school is far greater than the variation between schools, beyond that which would be expected.

Inappropriate within-school variation is therefore an area on which to focus leadership.

A College research project, Narrowing the gap: reducing within-school variation in pupil outcomes investigated effective practice in reducing variation, for example between comparable departments or between groups of students.

Key themes and strategies to reduce within-school variation – each of which directly or indirectly relates to effective middle leadership – included:

collection, analysis, interpretation and use of data
curriculum reform, with innovative suggestions for restructuring the curriculum so that it relates more to the interests of learners
development of teachers’ learning, for example through focused observations of specific aspects of practice
development of middle leaders’ skills to enable teachers to learn from the innovative practice of others in the school

Narrowing the Gap remains a priority for the College and to support this, we are undertaking a two-year research campaign. You can find out about existing research and current publications via our Narrowing the Gap research campaign page. This also provides an overview of on-going research activity and specific projects being done within this area.about Narrowing the Gap research and resources

Coaching and mentoring

Research shows that professional development is much more likely to be successful when it involves collaboration between staff. Coaching and mentoring are therefore essential to the development of middle leaders.

The Centre for the Use of Research and Evidence in Education (CUREE) has written about the evidence of what works in the National Framework for Mentoring and Coaching. This framework is now managed by the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA). CUREE also provides a range of resources relating to coaching and mentoring.

Our publication, Leading coaching in schools, explores successful coaching and offers working illustrations from schools. It identifies seven implications for school leaders and provides tools to help develop and evaluate coaching.

Succession planning and developing leaders

Middle leaders and those entering the profession are a rich resource for future headship. This is where succession planning comes in.

Succession planning is about moving those closest to headship into headship positions. The aims of the programme is to find, develop and keep great headteachers. Headteachers can play a vital role in securing the next generation of school leaders and part of their role is to identify and develop the talent in the school. Great leaders develop other leaders - it's a sign of excellence and a sure fire way of ensuring a successful and healthy school.

More information about succession planning.

National College supporting courses

Middle Leadership Development Programme

The Middle Leadership Development Programme is examining the feasibility of clusters of schools running their own middle leadership development programmes with National College support. It also provides opportunities for middle leaders to focus on themselves as learners and develop their knowledge, skills and understanding of adult learning, ultimately enabling support of other middle leaders.

Find out more about the Middle Leadership Development Programme.