Successful schools rest on collective leadership.
Teachers are the heart of education, but it is collective leadership that unlocks lasting improvement in student outcomes. The Foundation resources the shift from individual roles to team-based capability across schools.
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.
The Menzies Leadership Foundation continues 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.
In complex environments, resilience comes not from heroic leaders doing more, but from capable teams doing leadership together.
The work, and who we do it with.
Every initiative below sits on the Foundation’s interactive leadership ecosystem map, with the partners delivering it.
Featured · 2023–2026Ethical Futures by Design
Ethics by Design: Leading New Futures is a curriculum-aligned leadership initiative co-developed by the Ethics Centre, the Menzies Leadership Foundation and a youth advisory council. The intiiative developed a one-term interdisciplinary leadership program where students bring their creativity, passion, and ideas to make a real difference in leading change.
Menzies School Leadership Incubator
Reports, tools and recordings
from this work.
Cultivating Collective Efficacy Webinar
The education system currently focuses on the development of individual leaders. However, to build collective efficacy we need to focus on both leader and leadership development, a combination of leadership of self, leadership of others and leadership of systems.
Cultivating Collective Efficacy Report
Despite significant investment in leadership development, the school leadership pipeline in Australia is in crisis. We need a new approach to leadership that supports school leaders to better manage transformational change and deepen collaborative capacity necessary to cultivate collective efficacy to improve student learning outcomes.
Rising Team for Schools
Rising Team for Schools is a digital service that helps school leaders and educators grow together with a comprehensive curriculum and tools to strengthen collective efficacy. The platform includes software-guided workshops, built-in surveys and an AI coach.