Project leaders: Australian Primary Principals Association (APPA)

This research will:

• Conduct a rigorous review of educational leadership literature(with a focus on Australian research) to identify what works in equity-focused leadership and make these insights widely accessible to the sector.

• Engage aspiring and experienced leaders to test and refine the thematic mapemerging from the literature, ensuring it reflects the lived realities of schools and highlights practical strategies for equity-driven decision making.

• Develop professional learning materials for delivery through national Principals’ Associationsthat explicitly build leaders’ capacity to exercise instructional leadership, organisational management, and culture/community establishment through an equity lens.

Project leaders: Queensland Association of State School Principals (QASSP)

This project seeks to identify what keeps principals in the job, by exploring what keeps them coming back to work every day under increasingly complex and challenging conditions. Prior research into principal attraction and retention has frequently focused largely on the challenges of the role, which has contributed to deficit discourses about the work of principals today and potentially affects future interest in the role for aspiring leaders.

This project extends upon the foundation of prior research by taking an appreciative inquiry stance and developing a context-sensitive, strengths-focused inquiry into the experiences of school principals, aiming specifically to better understand the approaches that promote longevity and sustainability in the role.

Project leaders: Australian Secondary Principals’ Association (ASPA)

This research project will develop a structured, research-informed, and association-led process that reimagines leadership development as system learning.

Through a co-design approach, this research will work in partnership with principals, associations, and system leaders to generate practical, contextually grounded approaches to system leadership. By leveraging principals as catalysts of reform, the project seeks to strengthen their agency, deepen their role in shaping system priorities, and create the conditions for sustainable educational improvement.

Project leaders: Australian Capital Territory Principals’ Association (ACTPA)

The focus of this research is to investigate how school principals in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) are exercising leadership to navigate system-wide reform implementation, with particular emphasis on effective change management and reform implementation strategies. The study examines the landmark Strong Foundations reform package as the primary case, given its significance as a mandated whole-system reform that fundamentally alters pedagogical approaches across the ACT public education system.