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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

Teams and teamwork

Good teamwork enables middle leaders to establish common attitudes, values and practices across the school, key stage, subject or aspect.

Emma Gilboy is a middle leader at Oldway Primary School, Paignton and is responsible for history, geography and religious education. The team she leads has genuine delegated responsibility for developing a new approach to assessment in the humanities across the school.

In this video clip, we see how Emma directs her questions to ensure that everyone contributes to the discussion about progress so far. This dialogue also helps to develop the leadership capacity of team members, which is an important consideration for a team leader.

We asked Emma what she thought was key to being a successful middle leader.

"To be a very good middle leader, you need to be good at communicating with people, building teams, motivating teams, having a very clear sense of purpose and direction, helping to take people in that direction as well, and obviously keeping up to date with your subject and new initiatives."

View a transcript of this video.