Understanding middle leadership: practices and policies

There is a long and rich history of research, scholarship and publication on educational leadership, albeit that most of this has centred on the important work of principals and school senior managers/administrators. More recently there has been growing interest in middle leadership. We have been researching and publishing about educational middle leadership for about 10 years now, and this led us to propose this special issue of School Leadership and Management. To initiate the development of this special issue, we, the guest editors, put out a call for expressions of interest (EOI), and 25 were received from across 12 different countries, and this is indicative of the broad interest in this topic. From these EOIs, about half were invited to prepare full papers that were then subjected to all the usual reviewing and revision procedures. The result is this special issue, which brings together a collection of articles from international researchers that consider what drives change in education – specifically the important work and practices of middle leaders. Importantly, it continues the developing dialogue about, and theorisation of, middle leadership in ways that understand it as complementary to, but not the same as, principal leadership or senior school management.