Navigating the Middle Ground: The Development of a Conceptual Framework for Middle Leadership in Public Schools

Middle leadership plays a pivotal role in public schools. However, the complexities of middle leaders who hold leadership responsibilities outside the managerial line, such as subject leaders or department heads, are often oversimplified and unrecognised in their distinct position. Significant challenges emerge, particularly from a normative understanding of distributed leadership, in which decision-making is delegated to non-managerial staff, where the role is applied as if it were a strategy. At the organisational level, middle leaders often become a default solution to excessive responsibilities, generating ineffective resource utilisation. At the role level, this creates unrealistic expectations among colleagues and management, leading to discrepancies that hinder decision-making progress. At the person level, this mismatch fosters stress and confusion due to diverse conflicting demands. This raises the pertinent question of how educational organisations can adequately address the complexities of middle leadership. Building on the author's previous research, which was analysed through systems theory, this conceptual paper aims to offer public schools a critical re-conceptualisation of the middle leader. Presenting a novel, reflective framework, the EDULEAD framework, to discuss middle leader responsibilities, the intention is to cultivate better synchronisation between organisational expectations and middle leader practices, thereby enhancing capacity and promoting sustainable middle leader operations.