Effective middle leadership
There is much that senior and middle leaders can do to enable middle leadership to thrive. This section suggests the need for a whole-school focus on teaching and learning and outlines the qualities and requirements that support positive relationships and effective teams.
- Leading teaching and learning
- Personalised learning
- Leading change
- Leading teams
- Learning-centred leadership
Leading teaching and learning
The role of the middle leader is pivotal in securing a focus on learning and teaching and, through their leadership, in constantly improving the quality of teaching and learning in schools and children’s centres in order to improve outcomes for all pupils and young people.
A report by McKinsey on world-class education systems concluded, "The quality of a school system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers". (Barber, M and Mourshed, M, 2007, How the world's best-performing school systems come out on top, London, McKinsey & Company)
This supports the belief that all school leaders need to be effective leaders of teaching and learning. The report suggests that three things matter most.
- Getting the right people to become teachers.
- Developing them to become effective instructors so that every lesson, in every school, every day is a good one.
- Ensuring the system is able to deliver the best instruction for every child.
"The best schools provide learning of a consistently high quality in an efficient and highly effective, learner centred environment". (David Hargreaves, 2009, A Local Solutions Approach to System Change)
More information about teaching and learning.
Personalised learning
Personalised learning is a structured and responsive approach that empowers individual pupils to direct their own learning.
Middle leaders help to lead personalised learning across the whole school. They support and develop a strategic approach, manage the operational issues and support a culture that enables personalised learning to be effective.
More information and resources on personalised learning.
Leading change
High performing and rapidly improving schools have developed learning-centred leadership that changes practice to ensure effective teaching and learning. There is a strong commitment to learning about learning, and to improving the quality of learning.
The role of the middle leader is to embrace, implement and monitor change initiatives. Through them, schools can focus on improving teaching and learning, reducing the variation in teaching and narrowing the achievement gap between the most and least advantaged pupils.
“Middle leaders provide the link between senior leaders and their colleagues, ensuring that whole-school policy and planning is implemented at a classroom level. They are both the conduit as well as the interpreters of either discussions with or decisions made by senior leaders.” (Moore, E, 2007, Ringing the changes)
Qualities and requirements for leading change
Leading change is a complex, interactive social practice. Middle leaders need to be able to live with uncertainty, learn from mistakes, be adaptable and have the capacity to build trusting relationships.
Recent research suggests that, where there has been successful change, middle and senior leaders:
- have a clear and explicit set of educational values that includes notions of inclusion and equity
- have established an explicit understanding of pedagogy to enable both pupils and staff to develop
- are able to ‘read’ individuals, groups and organisations
- scan the wider social, political and cultural agendas and trends, and think about what they mean for schooling
- know themselves well and continue to build a rich set of resources to help them lead change
- have support processes, such as close critical friends who challenge their ideas
- can work in a team, lead a team and understand its various stages and developments
- possess finely honed communication and people skills
- have a ‘can do’ attitude
Leading teams
Good teamwork enables middle leaders to establish common attitudes, values and practices across the school or area of responsibility.
In a project that investigated effective middle leadership in secondary schools, high levels of trust were evident in each department or team. This manifested itself in everyday interactions and working practices, and permeated all relationships in the team.
Tips for middle leaders: building positive relationships
Our publication, The heart of the matter, has the following tips for middle leaders who need to generate positive relationships in their teams.
Engage with people as individuals
Take time to talk to people. Be sensitive to the pressures of work and remember that people want to do a good job. Use humour to defuse tension. Stop to think about the range of relationships you need to develop and sustain, both within and beyond your team.
Understand individuals’ strengths and values
Identify and acknowledge individuals’ strengths and potential, and empower them to take risks and improve. Be sure to acknowledge the work of support staff as well as of teachers. Develop your role as a facilitator by knowing what people want to achieve and enabling everyone to make an active contribution.
Encourage responsibility for the team
Deliberately shift your vocabulary from ‘my team’ to ‘our team’.
Use senior leaders to recognise endeavour
Use senior leaders to recognise commitment and endeavour from members of your team. This affirms staff in their roles and gives senior leaders a chance to show that they know and understand the work of individual teachers.
Walk the talk
Act as a model for how the team relates to students and staff in all situations.
Act on good suggestions
Be an active listener with your team and colleagues. Be seen to act on good suggestions, not just acknowledge them.
Tips for senior leaders: encouraging teamwork
Build relationships
Talk to your team individually and regularly. Identify development needs, note areas of expertise and grow leadership potential. Ask team members what else you could do to support them and how you too can develop and improve.
Empower middle leaders
Encourage innovation and support middle leaders as risk takers. Enable them to rehearse how they will respond to situations, to generate alternative responses and see different perspectives.
Model good relationships
Model the behaviour you expect from others. Listen, provide positive feedback and explore the bigger picture together. Focus on strengths rather than weaknesses and wipe out any culture of negativity. Celebrate good practice.
Clarify rights and responsibilities
Ensure people know what is expected of them, whether they are pupils, teachers or support staff. This helps to ensure everyone feels valued.
Don’t be too task oriented
Your teams will be successful if you are able to work with and through people. Tasks are important too, but don’t be too task oriented.
Be a critical friend
Encourage open and honest discussion. Propose possible ways forward and provide a regular forum for debate.
Learning-centred leadership
Learning-centred leadership focuses on influencing teaching and learning in classrooms and across the school directly, indirectly and reciprocally. Because headteachers and other senior leaders work with and through others, their indirect influence is the most significant.
Effective school leaders work on these indirect influences through three interrelated strategies: modelling, monitoring and dialogue. In addition, they need school systems and structures to be focused on learning-centred leadership.
Modelling
Modelling is about the power of example to influence pupils and colleagues alike.
Research shows that teachers watch their leaders closely to check whether their actions are consistent over time and whether they do as they say. Teachers don’t follow leaders who can’t ‘walk the talk’.
Monitoring
Effective monitoring means leaders know what is going on in the classroom because they observe teachers at work and provide them with feedback.
Leaders also analyse and act on pupil progress and outcome data, such as assessment and test scores, school performance trends, parental opinion surveys, pupil attendance data and information from interviews with pupils.
Dialogue
Leaders create opportunities for teachers to talk with their colleagues about teaching and learning, and use this discussion to influence what happens in the classroom.
Structures and systems
Effective school systems and structures enable and support learning-centred leadership. They include:
- planning processes for lessons, units of work, periods of time, individuals and groups of pupils, classes and years
- target setting for individuals, groups, classes, years, key stages and the whole school
- communication systems, especially meetings
- monitoring systems that analyse and use pupil learning data, observe teaching and learning and provide feedback
- roles and responsibilities of leaders, including mentoring and coaching
- policies for teaching, learning, assessment and marking
With appropriate structures and systems in place, the school is an open organisation where leaders are well informed. Staff are familiar with one another’s roles, responsibilities and achievements. Classrooms are not private places; they are seen as centres of learning for staff who want to develop themselves and others.
We have produced two toolkits around the subject of learning-centred leadership. Find out more about the toolkits.
Related publications and resources
How do school leaders successfully lead learning?
Ringing the changes: the middle leaders' role in leading change
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