A few years ago, I worked with a school that had just promoted a talented teacher to Head of Faculty. She was sharp, respected, and full of ideas. In the early weeks, she arrived at meetings energised, with reams of suggestions in hand and questions about curriculum coherence, student outcomes, and team dynamics. Leadership gold.

By year two, things had changed. She still showed up, but the spark was gone. Her days were swallowed by scheduling disputes, performing triage on her Inbox, staff tension, and makeshift data tracking. Her leadership time had become a logistical mop-up. No coaching. No strategic input. And certainly no meaningful development.

By the end of year three, she was back in the classroom full-time. Quietly. No drama, no exit memo, just one more middle leader who tried to lead without support and realised the system wasn’t built for her to succeed.

Sadly, she wasn’t an exception. She was the pattern.

The Engine Matters More Than the Dashboard

Every school has a strategy. Some even laminate it.

But too many school strategies are dashboards without engines. They’re glossy documents, beautifully formatted, with goals like “improve student agency” or “build global capabilities,” yet no real plan for who’s meant to get behind the wheel and drive it.

That job falls to middle leaders. Not in theory. In practice. These are the Heads of Faculty, Year Level Coordinators, Directors of Learning, and pedagogical team leads who operationalise vision. They convert intent into action, values into daily tone, and policies into lived experience.

They’re not passengers. They’re not even navigators. They are the quite literally the grinding engine room.

Culture, Change, and Compliance Depend on the Middle

Want to know what your school really values? Watch a Head of Faculty navigate a behaviour incident. Watch how they support a staff member in crisis. Listen in on how they talk about the strategy in department meetings. That’s the culture. That’s where it lives.

Middle leaders carry the unspoken curriculum. They embody how things are really done. Their voice has more immediate influence on staff than the Principal’s. Their interpretation of policy becomes practice. Their buy-in determines momentum. Their hesitancy slows everything down.

They are also the ones asked to roll out new curriculum frameworks, juggle wellbeing priorities, track compliance demands, and explain why the timetable still doesn’t work for Year 8 Maths. They live in the overlap between the ideal and the operational.

They are not middle in influence. Only in name.

Undertrained, Undertime, Underheard

And yet, they lead teams of five or more staff members (and more in larger schools) with little to no formal training in leadership, coaching, or conflict management. Many inherit the title and a small time allowance. They are expected to lead without ever having been led well themselves.

In most schools, that time allowance isn’t enough to even maintain the status quo. It certainly doesn’t leave space for strategic planning or coaching. The leadership development budget tends to orbit the executive level. Middle leaders are told to "figure it out" or shadow someone who is just as overworked.

Add to that the unspoken assumption that they will translate the school’s strategic direction into meaningful, motivating goals for their team, despite never being invited to shape that direction in the first place.

It’s not just underinvestment. It’s structural negligence.

A System, Not a Saviour

Too often, leadership is viewed as a person, usually the Principal, rather than a distributed system. But schools, like any complex organisation, are ecosystems. And in an ecosystem, nothing works in isolation.

If your strategic development happens in the boardroom and your strategic delivery is expected from the classroom, then your middle leaders are the transmission system in between. They are the mechanism that makes the wheels turn. Or not.

When we ignore this system, we leak power. Good ideas die in translation. Strategy feels irrelevant to the frontline. Compliance becomes reactive instead of proactive. Innovation becomes isolated instead of integrated.

The solution isn’t to lead harder from the top. It’s to lead better through the middle.

Not Just Operators, But Designers

Middle leaders aren’t mechanics who fix what’s broken. They should be co-designers of the school’s future. That requires a fundamental shift in how we view their role. They are not just operational leaders; they are strategic thinkers in waiting.

They know the pressure points. They know where policy and practice misalign. They know which programs are working and which are just working people over. They hold the key to adaptive implementation, the type that responds to context and real-time challenges.

But if they’re only ever called upon once the plan is done, we lose the chance to make it better.

Strategy isn’t about control. It’s about capability. Middle leaders don’t need to be given the answers. They need to be given the pen.

Start with a Forum

What can you do? Don’t start by rewriting position descriptions. Start by creating a Middle Executive Forum — a space where middle leaders contribute to strategic planning, reflect on progress, and shape the direction of key initiatives.

Make it real. Give it time in the calendar. Offer professional learning not just in pedagogy, but in leadership, systems thinking, communication, and team management. Pair them with mentors. Let them shadow decision-making, not just implementation.

And, crucially, listen to them. Build feedback loops where their insights aren’t just tolerated but actively sought. If you’re asking them to lead their people, you have to lead them first.

This is not about symbolic inclusion. It’s about structural change.

Stop Running Your Strategy on Fumes

You don’t have a strategy problem. You have a structure problem. If your plan relies on a handful of senior leaders to carry it, it will stall. If it activates the 12 to 15 middle leaders who touch every team, every week, it can fly.

We call them middle leaders, but that’s not where their influence lies. They are the culture carriers, the change agents, the overlooked edge.

It’s time we stopped waiting for them to become future leaders — and recognised them as the executive team they already are.