Dr Amanda Heffernan is a lecturer in Leadership in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. 

Having previously worked as a school principal and principal coach and mentor for Queensland’s Department of Education, Amanda’s key research areas include leadership, social justice, and policy enactment. In particular, she is interested in the wider implications of accountability and autonomy for schools, as well as in how school leaders enact policies and discourses. 

Amanda's current research projects also focus on the working lives of school principals. She is interested in how the work of principals is enacted, as well as the impact of the principalship on other aspects of school leaders' lives. 

In 2019, Amanda was awarded the Hedley Beare Award for Educational Writing for her book The Principal and School Improvement: Theorising Discourse, Policy, and Practice. 

Amanda’s PhD thesis, awarded by the University of Queensland in 2017, explored the evolution of the principalship during a period of rapid school reforms. It won the ‘Research in Educational Leadership and Management Award’ for exceptional academic achievement in advanced studies in educational leadership, as selected by the Australian Council for Educational Leaders.

In 2016, Amanda was named a ‘New Voice Scholar’ in the area of Educational Leadership Research by the Australian Council of Educational Leaders. She was one of the 2015 recipients of the Australian Association for Research in Education’s Postgraduate Student Researcher Award for her paper exploring the way principals’ practices have changed since the 2008 introduction of NAPLAN testing. This paper was later named a finalist for Springer’s Best Paper award for the Australian Educational Researcher. 

In 2018, Amanda was a visiting scholar at the Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research at the Institute of Education, University College London. She also published her first sole-authored book, The Principal and School Improvement: Theorising Discourse, Policy and Practice. 

Amanda also has research interests in the lives and experiences of academics, including researching into the changing nature of academic work. 

Amanda is serving as the Conference Co-Chair for the Australian Association for Research in Education for the years 2019-2021.