Understanding middle leaders: a closer look at middle leadership in primary schools in Singapore

What is the nature of middle leadership in primary schools? What are middle leaders' understanding and experiences in leading learning and teaching? Set against the policy context of decentralised centralism in Singapore and an emerging worldwide trend of decentralisation as a means to encourage school-based development and innovation, this study seeks to understand how a distributed perspective of leadership may be operationalised in schools. Middle leaders from 12 primary schools in Singapore who attended a full-time programme for middle-level leaders noted the importance of: (1) learning by developing personal capacity in knowledge, skills and values; and (2) learning by understanding people, context and change. They were less comfortable with the notion of learning by participating in shared decision-making. The new mindset change required for all educators to be effective change agents signals the enormous complexity of the change process in fundamentally conservative educational systems.