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As the role of senior school leaders has become more complex, the leadership of improvement, innovation and change has been distributed to middle leaders. However, middle leaders are often not prepared for the shift to strategic thinking and leading. This chapter provides an overview of what it means to think and lead strategically when leading from the middle. Then, the theory is translated into practical templates and tools that can be employed by a middle leader. The context of this chapter is leading a faculty in a secondary school; however, the ideas and examples provided are easily translated to any middle leading context.

The current study investigated the impact of organisational trust on emotional well-being and performance of middle leaders during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

A convenience sample of 265 middle leaders in kindergartens in China responded involving trust in schools (e.g. trust in principal and trust in colleagues), emotional well-being and job performance. Both confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling (SEM) were used in the investigation.

Three hypotheses on the relationships between the three constructs were verified. Trust in schools significantly influenced emotional well-being and job performance of middle leaders which correlated with each other. The interactive effects of trust in principal and trust in colleagues were discussed for improving the well-being and job performance of middle leaders. Relationships between the two kinds of trust and pride were also identified in the research.

Further studies may put efforts towards improving these three outcomes synchronously.

Based on the evidence of the current study, future research may focus on how middle leaders act as a bridging role between different stakeholders such as principal and teachers, principal and parents, teachers and children, meanwhile how to boost the leaders' own well-being and performance in the early childhood education (ECE).

This study established the empirical linkages between school trusts, emotional well-being and job performance.

The purpose of this viewpoint article is to share the reflections of school and university leaders on the success of their emerging school–university partnership for the preparation of middle school teachers.

The article is a reflective paper in which the leaders of the school–university partnership discuss the benefits of establishing the initial school–university partnership and reflect on what has helped the partnership experience success in the partnership's first five years of existence.

While the authors describe their school-university partnership as emerging, both the school and the university have experienced successes. Upon reflection, the authors discuss four specific essential elements to their initial partnership success. Communication and collaboration among all stakeholders ensure all voices are heard and valued. Allowing the university to have a physical presence in the middle school encourages the building of trusting relationships. For partnerships to succeed, partners must allow time for the partnership to mature and grow. Finally, when the middle school hires graduates from the partnering university, this benefits both the school and university partners.

As teacher preparation moves further away from the university campus to engage more closely with schools, there are lessons to be learned. Reflection is an essential component of growth. The partners in this school–university partnership believe sharing the partners' experiences will enhance the effectiveness of the partners' own partnership and encourage others that choose to begin this journey.

Instructional leadership is a school leadership approach that emphasizes improving teaching and learning. This study explores how school middle leaders – teachers holding leadership positions in schools, who are responsible for a particular area or discipline of the school's curriculum – fulfill their instructional leadership role.

The participants in this qualitative study were 24 middle leaders (subject coordinators) in elementary schools in Israel. Data collection was based on semi-structured interviews, and data analysis included three stages: sorting, coding and categorizing.

The current study points to three main characteristics of instructional leadership in school middle leaders: leading by expertise; leading by collaboration; and leading by example.

At present, there is only scant literature on instructional leadership in school middle leaders. This study suggests that principals and middle leaders, who work closely with each other to provide instructional leadership in their schools, do so in different ways.

This chapter explores the development of middle leaders in the specific context of Catholic schools. It considers the interplay between contemporary thinking on educational leadership and the insights of Catholic theology and ministry. Two key themes foundational to this interplay are examined: the connection between leading and following, and the central importance of relationships for leadership. For each of these themes, the reader is provided with related questions for middle leaders in a Catholic school context, an activity for engaging with leaders, and an exercise inviting middle school leaders to reflect on their own experience and the context within which they lead.

This chapter explores middle leadership identity through the real-world accounts of how two middle leaders construct and develop their leadership identity and how this impacts the way their middle leadership is practiced. Leadership identity, an internal narrative of oneself as a leader which is practised professionally in context, represents a concept that is best understood as being unique to an individual, enduring over time, and a consequence of human experiences. Middle leadership is often the first promotion for teachers from teacher to leader and, as such, how middle leaders perceive themselves as a leader and how this formative process of leadership identity underpins middle leaders’ practices can make a significant impact on a leader’s decision making, professional relationships, behaviours, and actions. This chapter is co-authored by two researchers and two middle leaders with the intention of understanding middle leader identity development and its influence on middle leadership practices. Using interviews, middle leaders’ stories of identity were co-composed and re-storied to construct each middle leader’s narrative. This chapter concludes with a discussion on the influences of identity for middle leaders and considerations for leadership development.

There is a significant volume of literature relating to the mentoring needs of new principals and vice/deputy principals, but little is known about the mentoring needs of recently appointed middle leaders in an educational setting. This study explored the mentoring needs of five female middle leaders at a K–12 case study school of 550 students in Perth, Australia.

Each participant had three mentoring sessions, followed by a semi-structured interview using open-ended questions to provide data on the participants' mentoring needs. The research was framed within an interpretive phenomenology paradigm that focussed on the participants' perceived experiences and how they then interpreted these experiences. One of the researchers was active in this research, acting as the mentor (Neubauer et al., 2019; Smith and Osborn, 2021).

The findings of this study revealed the importance of the mentor being a “critical friend”. In addition, the participants referred to leadership identity, leadership from the middle, managing relationships and gender as other important mentoring needs.

This empirical study contributes original findings on the mentoring needs of a previously neglected group of educational leaders who provide an essential bridge between classroom practitioners and senior leadership in Australian schools. This study is unique because it links these mentoring needs to the practice architectures, factors at the case study school that either constrained or enabled middle leading (Kemmis et al., 2014).

The purpose of this study is to estimate the impact of conflict witnessed in Pakistan on the enrolment rates of boys and girls. Pakistan has the world’s second-highest number of out-of-school children, with an estimated 22.8 million children aged 5–16 years not attending school.

By merging data on violence with the data on enrolment rates, this paper finds that exposure to violence is correlated with a decline in overall district-level enrolment rates in the short run at primary-level schools and middle-level schools.

However, for boys, violence is also negatively correlated with enrolment rates at middle-level schools in the medium run. One possible mechanism tested in this paper is the potential substitution of boys into the labour market during a period of conflict.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper adds to the existing literature in several ways. Firstly, the effect of conflict on the labour market by impacting schooling for boys and girls is examined for the first time in Pakistan. Secondly, the district-level data set on enrolment rates used for this study is novel and has not been used before for this type of analysis. Thirdly, while this study strengthens the evidence that the short run effects of conflict are stronger than the long-run effects, it also confirms the negative effects of conflict do not fade away immediately. Fourthly, this study emphasizes that each conflict is unique in terms of its heterogeneous effects across different cohorts, such as gender, as these effects are dependent on the mechanism through which conflict impacts each individual.

This chapter offers Australian and international insights into leadership development and discusses how aspirant and current middle leaders can use leader and teacher professional standards to foster their professional growth. Standards help inform performance and development planning, and shape feedback and provide a framework for professional learning design. This chapter provides an overview of how systems such as New Zealand, Australia, and Scotland, among others, describe leadership in terms of standards. When used alongside an annual performance and development process, middle leaders can tap into the power of standards to continually sharpen their leadership practice and create a thriving career leading from the middle. Practical guidance is provided for middle leaders to engage with national teacher and leadership standards.