Enhancing instructional leadership: Lessons from the NSW Literacy and Numeracy Action Plan

Over the past decade, schools, school systems and governments at all levels have invested heavily in enhancing the quality of school leadership. The Australian Government-funded National Partnerships (2012–2014) identified principal leadership as one of its explicit goals. More recently, the emphasis of leadership development has been on enhancing instructional leadership. This paper describes an approach to enhancing instructional leadership adopted as part of the NSW Literacy and Numeracy Action Plan (2012–2016), which was the particular approach of the NSW government school sector. The three school sectors in NSW each adopted different models for their implementation of the Action Plan relevant to their differing contexts. The Action Plan implementation in the government sector (where it was known as Early Action for Success) had as its centrepiece the appointment of dedicated instructional leaders to the 310 most disadvantaged schools in the state. Their role was to build the capacity of teachers to deliver high-quality pedagogy through focused in-school professional learning. Drawing on the findings of a five-year evaluation of this Action Plan, this paper describes how the instructional leaders undertook their roles, the factors that influenced the success of the role, and their impact to date on schools, teachers and student learning