Across Australia and around the world, school-university partnerships have been advocated by researchers and policymakers as a means of bridging the perceived theory-practice divide for which teacher education programs have been criticised. A range of literature exists that explores school-university partnerships either from a theoretical perspective, or grounded in specific examples. As these pieces of research typically provide an overview of school-university partnerships in general, or rely on findings from one or two partnerships, a broad understanding of partnerships and the research gaps that remain can be difficult to ascertain. This paper presents a systematic literature review to provide collective evidence on the implementation of Australian school-university partnerships for the purpose of developing pre-service teachers. The review reports on 59 sources, providing insights into the range of school-university partnerships in existence. It also highlights the benefits and challenges encountered through partnership implementation and proposes opportunities for future research.

In Australia, there is a national education agenda for school improvement with an increasing focus on how school leaders can fulfil this agenda. As school principals are arguably faced with increasing demands, the importance of school middle leaders is increasing. This article presents the initial findings from a larger project on middle leadership in Australian schools, the first phase of which is a documentary analysis of significant texts including policy documents, websites and reports. The purpose of the document analysis was to examine expectations placed on, and support provided for, school middle leaders in Australian schools to make explicit the potential implications for policymakers, leaders and researchers investigating this field. We argue there is a lack of clarity about the role of middle leadership across Australia, with unclear policies, and variations in expectations, titles and levels of support. What is evident is that middle leaders play a pivotal role as they lead teaching, learning, and pastoral care. They carry out these roles in subject areas, key stages and classrooms, and among teachers. While there are a range of professional development provisions for middle leaders across different states, middle leadership needs to be an area of increased focus across Australia.

Increasingly, educational systems are appreciating the importance of middle leaders leading educational improvement in schools. Schools depend on middle leaders to lead site-based educational development in areas including curriculum development, teacher professional learning and student learning improvement. Middle leaders are in a unique but complex position where they influence both executive leadership and teachers within the school organisation. Adopting case study methodology to investigate the practices and influence of middle leaders leading a school-based educational development project, three semi-structured interviews and artefacts from two middle leaders were collected over eight months. The theory of practice architectures afforded an examination of data to explain the conditions and arrangements enabling and constraining the middle leaders’ practices of influence. The findings showed middle leaders’ influence was dependent on executive leadership support, time, formal role descriptions and trusting relationship. Furthermore, the results reveal middle leaders can influence educational development at the school level through advocating for, collaborating with, and empowering colleagues to support teacher ownership of site-based projects. Of interest, this study showed influence can be reciprocal, between middle leaders and colleagues, and between middle leaders and executive leadership.