Wright, NoelineCook, Sheralyn F.Greenhill, Deborah2025-12-012025-12-012025https://hdl.handle.net/10289/17800Educational leadership frameworks and organisational literature have extensively documented successful leadership approaches, practices, change processes, and reform models. However, the literature lacks a nuanced understanding of how individual leaders, particularly middle leaders, make sense of and respond to implementing school-wide change. This study centres on how curriculum (middle) leaders in a traditional secondary school in Aotearoa New Zealand (AoNZ), interpret and translate a school vision into practice to shift their school's learning culture. This interpretive study uses one school as a case study and six participants, five of whom are middle (curriculum) leaders and one senior leader participant. The findings are drawn from their transcripts from semi-structured interviews and associated documents they submitted for analysis. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to generate authentic insights into their lived experiences. Key findings revealed that vision enactment involves a complex interplay between contextual realities and professional agency. While inclusive vision development fostered collective ownership, curriculum leaders were crucial intermediaries, having to translate aspirational language into concrete, student-centred strategies. Their agency was enabled through structured frameworks but constrained by contextual factors, including external performativity pressures and internal entrenched traditions. The study identified specific enablers (collaborative structures, embedded professional development, external expertise) and inhibitors (inadequate change management support, limited cross-faculty collaboration) affecting vision enactment. These findings demonstrate that meaningful educational change requires not only distributing leadership but also providing robust support systems that recognise the pivotal role of curriculum leaders as bridges between vision and sustainable learning culture change. The study contributes to the field by offering insights into how curriculum leaders interpret a school vision and exercise professional agency to translate aspirational statements into classroom practices while navigating the complex contextual factors that enable and constrain their efforts.enAll items in Research Commons are provided for private study and research purposes and are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated.Thesis