Building Collective Capability
The Future of School Leadership in Practice
Schools are among the most important leadership environments in Australia. They shape future generations, anchor communities and carry increasing responsibility for learning, wellbeing and social cohesion. Yet the demands placed on schools continue to grow more complex. Educational leaders are navigating workforce pressure, student wellbeing challenges, rapid change, community expectations and systems that often ask more while resourcing less.
In this environment, the future of school leadership cannot rest on individual principals alone. It requires collective capability — teams able to lead together, adapt together and create the conditions for others to thrive.
In 2025, the Menzies Leadership Foundation continued to advance this vision through partnerships that connect practical innovation in schools with contemporary leadership research. Our School Leadership work is grounded in a simple belief: when leadership becomes a shared capability across a school, better outcomes follow for staff, students and communities.
A central focus of the year was the continued progress of Rising Team for Schools, developed in partnership with leading education collaborators. The program supports school leadership teams through practical tools and structured development experiences designed to strengthen trust, communication, collaboration and leadership effectiveness.
Rather than relying on one-off workshops or top-down training, Rising Team for Schools embeds leadership development into the rhythm of everyday work. Teams are supported to build stronger habits of reflection, alignment and shared responsibility — helping schools move from leadership dependency to leadership capacity.
Throughout 2025, participating schools continued to demonstrate encouraging progress. Feedback and early evidence indicated stronger team dynamics, improved collaboration, clearer communication and increased confidence among leadership teams navigating complex challenges. Importantly, the model supports sustainable leadership by strengthening the collective rather than overburdening the individual.
This reflects an important shift in educational leadership thinking. In complex environments, resilience comes not from heroic leaders doing more, but from capable teams doing leadership together.
Complementing this practical work was the Foundation’s ongoing partnership with the Australian National University Leadership & Complexity Lab, helping connect schools with leading-edge research on leadership in uncertain and fast-changing systems.
The Lab’s work explores how leaders can better navigate ambiguity, respond adaptively, work across competing priorities and build collective efficacy within institutions. These ideas are increasingly relevant in education, where schools must continuously respond to evolving student needs, workforce pressures and policy demands.
During 2025, insights from the Lab continued to inform the School Leadership portfolio, particularly around concepts such as systems thinking, adaptive leadership, adult development and the conditions required for high-performing collaborative teams. Rather than treating complexity as a problem to eliminate, the work encourages schools to develop the capability to operate within it more effectively.
This connection between research and practice is a defining strength of the Foundation’s approach. Too often, educational innovation and leadership research operate in separate worlds. Our role has been to help bring them together — ensuring schools can access evidence-based thinking, while researchers remain connected to the realities of day-to-day leadership practice.
As a result, schools are increasingly becoming sites of applied leadership experimentation: places where new models of collaboration can be tested, where collective efficacy can be strengthened, and where practical lessons can inform broader system reform.
Across 2025, one message became increasingly clear. The future of school leadership will not be built through titles alone. It will be built through teams with the capability to learn, adapt and lead together.
By investing in both practice and research, the Foundation is helping shape a more resilient and future-ready model of educational leadership — one capable of meeting the complexity of the times, while creating better conditions for those who learn and work within schools every day.
Schools are among the most important leadership environments in Australia — yet the demands placed on educational leaders continue to outpace the systems designed to support them. Through the continued development of Rising Team for Schools and its partnership with the ANU Leadership & Complexity Lab, the Menzies Leadership Foundation continued to invest in collective capability: helping schools move from leadership dependency to leadership capacity, with encouraging early evidence of stronger team dynamics, clearer communication and greater confidence among leaders navigating complex challenges.
The future of school leadership will not be built through titles alone. It will be built through teams with the capability to learn, adapt and lead together — and if you are committed to creating better conditions for educators and the next generation, we invite you to stay connected with the Menzies Leadership Foundation and the work advancing a more resilient model of educational leadership across Australia.
