Who is the literacy leader?

On taking up a position of Head of Faculty English in a new school, I soon started getting mail in my pigeon hole addressed to “Literacy Leader”. Too often still, the teaching of literacy is conflated with subject English. Drawing primarily on insights offered in conversation with Susan Sandretto, senior lecturer in Education at Otago University, and Alana Madgwick, facilitator of the online secondary literacy forum, as well as some literature to which they referred me, this article explores two different ways in which this confusion is problematic and fails to create the ideal support for the teaching of literacy, particularly at senior secondary level.