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Introduction
In Australia, schools can often secure small amounts of money to support a teaching and learning innovation within their school. These funds usually come from federal or state governments; are almost always quite modest; and often come with a range of compliance measures that further rob teachers of the very commodity that they lack – quality time (Larkin et al., 2015). Despite these barriers to success, schools regularly apply for these small grants and use them to provide impetus for educational reform in their schools. In this paper, we present a case study of one school site and discuss how they leveraged upon a small government grant to bring about sustained curriculum and pedagogical reform. In particular, we focus on the work of middle leaders in securing, developing, and sustaining educational change. This case study was undertaken in a large, urban, co-educational independent public primary school in South-East Queensland. As part of the school’s overall vision, the school aimed to provide a collaborative, inquiry based learning environment supported by a range of digital technologies.
Middle leading
There is a plethora of educational leadership literature that relates to the important work of principals and positional heads; therefore, in this paper, we focus on the leading of middle leaders and in so doing argue for the vital role they play in enacting school educational change. In a school context, these are the leaders who have both a formal leadership role and classroom teaching responsibilities (Grootenboer et al., 2014). They have role titles that include Head of Curriculum, Senior Teacher and Pedagogy Coach, amongst others. Importantly here, Leithwood (2016) concluded that middle leaders are well placed to provide strategic leadership in learning and teaching, and thus have an impact on student learning outcomes. This is because middle leaders exercise their leading practices close to classrooms, the site where learning occurs (Grootenboer, 2018). Thus, compared to the leading of principals, which is likely to be more distant, middle leaders are key people in actually leading and developing education (Lingard et al., 2003). On this point, Weller (2001) commented:
No other position has more potential to increase school effectiveness than the department-head position because it is a direct extension of the school’s administration and department heads...