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• Leading schools
  • Developing your leadership
    • Middle leadership
      • Middle leadership in primary schools
        • Set direction and plan
        • Innovate and lead change
        • Motivate and influence others
        • Professional expertise and knowledge
        • Teams and teamwork
        • Value inclusion
        • Role of the headteacher

Set direction and plan

To be successful, middle leaders need a clear vision and sense of purpose. Their role in setting direction and planning sits within the strategic direction for the school as a whole.

The video clip shows Jemima Wade who is an assistant headteacher at Argyle Primary School in Camden, north London. She has responsibility for numeracy. She has made good progress towards very specific goals: in this case, raising standards in maths by improving pupils’ problem-solving skills.

She constructed plans in consultation with staff and governors, based on a careful analysis of performance and processes. The plans were straightforward and explicit and, most importantly, included clear targets for improvement within specific time frames.

Jemima has been able to communicate these plans to her colleagues, and she motivates and influences others to implement them. She works closely with teams of teachers and teaching assistants, making good use of her professional knowledge and expertise to lead the changes.

Having set out the direction in which she expected things to go, Jemima established the structures and systems that would translate her plans into action. She monitored the implementation and impact of initiatives, and supported her colleagues by means of modelling and dialogue.

We asked Alison Fitch, from Boxgrove Primary School, Guildford, Surrey what she thought was key to being a successful middle leader.

"Relationships are the key to everything I do, because you can have the greatest ideas about where you want the school or department to go but if you don’t have people that want to follow you or be with you, then you're not going to achieve anything."

She has been working closely with the Key Stage 1 team of teachers and learning assistants at Boxgrove, where she is responsible for literacy in this key stage.

The goal for the Key Stage 1 team was to raise standards of reading and writing, which were already good, still further by improving pupils’ speaking and listening skills and targeting specific pupils in Years 1 and 2 for additional support. We can see how Alison achieves her goals through monitoring the outcomes of this initiative with her Key Stage 1 team.

View a transcript of this video.