New releases – Amba Press

What kind of leader are you when no one is watching? The Virtuous Leader makes a compelling case that effective leadership is, first and foremost, a moral activity – and that competence, without character, is never enough. Drawing on decades of experience leading some of Australia's most respected independent schools, Dr Timothy Wright and Clive Logan argue that the leaders who earn lasting trust and create genuinely thriving organisations are those who do not merely hold good values but who live them, consistently and habitually, until virtue becomes reflex. Grounded in the rich tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas and brought to life through honest reflection and real-world experience, The Virtuous Leader explores the virtues that matter most for leaders navigating the complexity of schools and organisations today: practical wisdom, love, courage, truthfulness, justice, humility and hope. This is not a book of quick fixes or leadership slogans. It is a thoughtful, searching guide for leaders willing to examine their own motivations, confront their blind spots and commit to the slow, worthwhile work of becoming the kind of leader others are proud to follow.

Behaviour Is Not the Whole Story $39.95

When challenging behaviour appears in a classroom, early years setting or care environment, it draws immediate attention. But what is visible on the surface is rarely the whole story. Behaviour Is Not the Whole Story is a practical, grounded guide for educators, leaders and teams who want to move beyond reactive responses and build behaviour support that is informed, consistent and sustainable. Drawing on extensive field-based experience across early years, school and OSHC settings, Kelly Oldfield offers a wider lens on behaviour — one that looks beyond the visible act to the regulation, communication, environment, adult responses and systems that shape it. Structured across four parts and packed with practical tools including reflection prompts, practice scenarios and ready-to-use frameworks, this book helps educators and leaders ask better questions, build stronger systems and create settings where young people can genuinely thrive. This is not a book of quick fixes or one-size-fits-all strategies. It is a thoughtful, realistic guide for people who understand that stronger outcomes for young people come from strengthening the adults, environments and systems around them.

Building Schools for Boys $44.95

What does it take to build a school that forms good men? Building Schools for Boys offers a compelling and practical framework for educators committed to this question. Drawing on decades of global research and real-world school leadership, Professor Phil Cummins and David Atkinson argue that character is not an add-on to a boys' education – it is the whole work. Grounded in the conviction that boys thrive when they belong, fulfil their potential and learn to do good in the world, this book challenges schools to move beyond narrow academic measures and build cultures of intentional character formation. Spanning six key dimensions of school life – contribution, hope, intention, expectation, value and experience – the book weaves together research, practical frameworks and rich case studies from outstanding schools across Australia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. Whether you lead a boys' school, teach in one or are rethinking what education for young men can and should be, Building Schools for Boys offers both the rationale and the roadmap for schools where boys become the good men the world needs.

Stretch $39.95

Middle leaders are the engine room of school improvement – yet they are too often underprepared, overstretched and under-supported. Stretch: Navigating Pressure and Impact in Middle Leadership is a practical guide for middle leaders navigating the demanding space between classroom and boardroom, between doing and leading. Drawing on decades of real-world leadership experience, Steven Trotter offers honest, research-informed insights into the pressures that define middle leadership, and the strategies that make those pressures manageable, meaningful and ultimately transformative. Structured across three parts, Stretch moves from the lived realities of middle leadership – cognitive load, time pressure, emotional intelligence and role ambiguity – through to six concrete levers for elevating leadership practice, and finally to a set of reflections for leaders building toward the future. This is not a book of tidy answers or one-size-fits-all solutions. It is a guide for leaders willing to pause, reflect and grow – because when the stretch is understood and embraced, it becomes the very engine of lasting impact.

-23% sale

Phil Cummins Character bundle $119.95 $154.75

Get all 5 books in this special bundle.

-6% sale

Emma Derainne bundle $74.95 $79.00

Grab Emma Derainne's two books in this bundle. How Good are School Gardens? (published October 2024)Teach, Parent, Repeat (published May 2026)

Lean Monitoring $34.95

Leading school improvement means navigating long stretches of uncertainty between launching a strategy and seeing results. Too often, school leaders find themselves in what Dr Simon Breakspear calls the messy middle: too far in to stop, but too far from the end to know if they are on track. Lean Monitoring: How to Know if What You're Doing is Actually Working is a practical guide to closing that gap, helping school leaders build simple, sustainable habits for tracking progress during improvement work rather than waiting for end-of-year data that arrives too late to act on. The first book in the Agile School Improvement Series, Lean Monitoring introduces one of three core practices at the heart of Simon's approach to leading change in schools: staying oriented during the journey rather than hoping things are heading in the right direction. Drawing on a decade of work alongside more than 5,000 school leaders across multiple countries, Simon offers clear frameworks and ready-to-use tools including the Impact Canvas, Data Capture Card and Insight Protocol, giving leaders the confidence to make better decisions mid-course and keep improvement moving forward.

Digital Literacy Handbook $29.95

Navigate the digital world with confidence using this practical, student-centred guide that transforms online safety and digital literacy from abstract concepts into real, actionable skills. From spotting misinformation and understanding algorithms to managing your digital footprint and using AI responsibly, this comprehensive handbook walks you through everything you need to think critically, stay safe and make smarter choices in the online spaces you already inhabit every day. Each chapter builds essential skills – from protecting your privacy and data to practising ethical digital citizenship and harnessing technology for creative, productive learning. With relatable real-life examples, engaging reflection activities and guidance across social media, cybersecurity and emerging technologies, this book equips students with the tools to not only navigate today's digital landscape with confidence but also shape a positive, purposeful online identity that works for them – not for the algorithm.

Writing a Non-boring Family History $29.95

FAMILY-HISTORY SLEUTHING IS TODAY'S BIGGEST HOBBY WORLDWIDE This unique and practical handbook will help you craft the history of your ancestors in an interesting and rewarding way that other people will want to read. Hazel Edwards addresses the vital issues of how to: interview elderly relatives and people close to the family use anecdotes and record memories do justice to intriguing ancestors structure the drama and tension inject life into a name on a shipping list present the family's secrets diplomatically. This revised edition of Hazel's best-selling guide to writing a family history acknowledges the latest e-formats that writers use, includes helpful tips on how to write history for children or write a eulogy, and covers the growing interest in touring military battlefields and researching onsite material.

Wolf Logic. Play-Based Leadership. $39.95

Leadership has never been more demanding — and too often, it has become heavy, defined by control, compliance, and endurance rather than connection and trust. But the most powerful leadership lessons aren't found in boardrooms. They're found in the wild. Before wolves hunt, they play. Before they perform, they connect. Before they move, they synchronise. Drawing on decades of experience across education, elite sport, and high-performance cultures, Dale Sidebottom, Paul Campbell, and Nick Haywood reveal what wolf packs have always known: trust comes before tactics, connection comes before command, and the strongest teams don't move alone — they move as one. Wolf Logic is a bold, practical guide to Play-Based Leadership — the understanding that joy, curiosity, and connection aren't distractions from high performance, they're the engine of it. Through powerful stories, research-backed insights, and ready-to-use tools, you'll discover The Trust Lab — a five-pillar framework for building psychological safety, creating shared identity, earning trust before demanding performance, and executing with courage and clarity. This isn't a book about being softer. It's about becoming more instinctive — the kind of leader who builds cultures where people feel safe to speak up, take risks, and grow, without ever lowering the standard. The world doesn't need more serious leaders. It needs playful ones.

Teaching Business $44.95

Teaching Business: A Practical Guide for Secondary School Teachers is an indispensable resource for educators at every stage of their career. Written by experienced Business Studies teacher, HSC Senior Marker and MBA graduate Ben Andersen, this book cuts through the noise of competing educational theories to deliver clear, classroom-tested strategies that genuinely work. Structured around three core actions – content delivery, application strategies and business communication – it offers practical tools to streamline complex content, reduce cognitive overload and develop the kind of flexible business thinking that prepares students not just for exams, but for life beyond school. More than a teaching manual, Teaching Business makes a compelling case for why business education matters. Andersen argues that all life is business, and that teachers of this subject occupy a uniquely powerful position to cultivate personal empowerment, ethical leadership and entrepreneurial thinking in the next generation. Whether you are a first-year teacher handed a syllabus and a dusty textbook, or a seasoned educator looking to sharpen your craft, this book offers the practical mentorship, honest reflection and actionable guidance to help you – and your students – thrive.

-12% sale

The Secret Series: Shelley Davidow chapter book bundle $44.95 $50.85

The Secret Series brings together all 3 phonetic chapter books written and illustrated by Shelley Davidow, perfect for young readers ready to take their next big step. Follow Tim and his magical snake Jake as they navigate the delights and dilemmas of an unlikely friendship. Join Mina as a mysterious sound in the night leads her through a secret door and into a world beyond her imagining. And meet Josh, whose favourite book comes startlingly to life right in his own bedroom. Together, these three adventures offer young readers a rich and engaging world full of warmth, humour and just the right amount of mischief. Designed to build reading confidence through carefully sequenced phonetic principles, each book in this collection introduces new vowel patterns, digraphs and consonant blends in the context of stories children will genuinely want to read. A perfect gift for newly independent readers, and an invaluable classroom and home library resource.

Empowering Schools $39.95

Australian education is caught in a storm. NAPLAN dominates the headlines, 'best practice' has become a byword for compliance, and the data tells a sobering story – falling attendance, disengaged students, and nearly four in ten teachers planning to leave the profession. Yet the system's response has been more of the same: narrower accountability, thinner pedagogy, louder metrics. Empowering Schools asks a different question: what if the problem isn't that we need better practices, but a better way of being in education altogether? Drawing on thinkers including Biesta, Freire, Ahmed and Spinoza, Dr Benjamin C. Zonca makes the case for empowerment as a relational, collective and continuous process – one that cannot be reduced to a checklist but can be cultivated and sustained. Through a clear Framework for Empowerment and eight interconnected Empowerment Practices spanning time, assessment, curriculum design, collaboration, critical literacy and policy, this book invites teachers and leaders to slow down, challenge their assumptions, and build schools where students, teachers and communities can genuinely thrive. Empowerment cannot be given – but the conditions for it can be created.

Teach, Parent, Repeat $39.95

Teaching has always been demanding. But somewhere between the staffroom and the school run, the lesson plans and the bedtime routine, it became something else entirely: relentless. Teach, Parent, Repeat says what teachers are thinking but are rarely allowed to say out loud: that the emotional labour is enormous, the expectations are contradictory and the line between who you are at work and who you are at home stopped existing a long time ago. Written by teacher, researcher and mother Emma Derainne, this is an honest, warm and wickedly funny survival guide for educators who still care deeply – and are quietly wondering how long they can keep going at this pace. Through sharp personal storytelling and grounded research, Teach, Parent, Repeat names the invisible load, challenges the myth of endless holidays and offers something genuinely rare: permission to set boundaries, lead with humanity and fall in love with teaching again – on your own terms.

-17% sale

Early Phonetic Readers by Shelley Davidow bundle $49.95 $59.70

Get all six books in this special bundle. These warm and wonderful readers will delight both students and teachers as they guide young children along the path of written language one step at a time. Written in order and phonetically, each story focuses on specific word groups, sounds and sentence structures. Each story has a beginning, middle and an ending. Succeeding stories build on these skills and then move on to the next level of skill. The books are conceived in much the same way as the "Dick and Jane" readers of an earlier era, but with a very important difference: these stories have a touching "heart content" to them. The stories are gently humorous while honoring nature, animals and the environment. The illustrations in their warm simplicity are wonderful compliments to the stories! Whether you are rewarding an eager reader with a first experience of reading something someone else wrote, or helping a struggling reader get the hang of all those letters, these readers are sheer joy for everyone. The six books use simple words that the early reader will easily grasp. They have been carefully chosen by a reading specialist to help students advance from the short vowels to the silent "e" to the vowel combinations. At the back of each book is a list of sight words that should be reviewed with the child before reading the book. Appropriate for Grades 1-3.

The Secret Door: Book 2 $16.95

The Secret Door follows the beloved phonetic chapter book series written and illustrated by Shelley Davidow. In this second chapter book, we return to the world of nine-year-old Mina, her sister Jo, and their neighbour Tim, whose extraordinary pet snake, Jake, is never far from the action. When a mysterious sound in the night leads Mina on an unexpected adventure, she discovers a secret that takes her far beyond her backyard and into a world she never imagined. Along the way, she and her friends must face danger, make difficult choices, and learn that courage often means stepping through a door, even when you don't know what's on the other side. A perfect next chapter book for young readers building confidence with vowel patterns, digraphs and multisyllabic words. It focuses on long vowels, diphthongs and the combinations ar, or, er, ir, oo, ou, ow, oi, oy, au, aw and ea.

The Secret Wish: Book 3 $16.95

The Secret Wish concludes the beloved phonetic chapter book series written and illustrated by Shelley Davidow. In this third and final chapter book, we meet Josh, whose favourite book holds more magic than he ever suspected. When the two tiny characters from its pages escape into his room, very much alive and full of mischief, Josh finds himself pulled into an adventure he could never have imagined. Sliding slugs, crazy crickets and darting fish are just the beginning, as the two tiny kids make Josh an unlikely part of their world. Through the mayhem and mishaps, Josh discovers that sometimes the best stories are the ones you end up living yourself. A perfect final chapter book for young readers building confidence with consonant blends and digraphs, including qu, sh, th, wh, gl, sl, bl, gr, tr and more.

The Secret Pet: Book 1 $16.95

The Secret Pet follows the delightful Early Reader Series of books also written by Shelley Davidow. In this first chapter book, we meet again several of the characters from the introductory series, most notably the boy Tim and Jake the magical snake. Tim and Jake become fast friends, both of them deciding that they simply must be together. This entails Tim sneaking Jake into his home, since Tim's mother is not very fond of snakes, and into school, where pets really aren't welcome. Through their adventures, they both discover some truths about the differences between life in the wild and life in a home, and how it is that we change our habits and inclinations out of love for one another. A perfect chapter book for young readers who are learning to decode consonant and vowel blends, punctuation meaning and sentence structure. The book focuses on vowel teams such as ea, ie, oe, ue, digraphs, open and closed syllables and more.

Kay and Jay: Book 6 $9.95

These warm and wonderful readers will delight both students and teachers as they guide young children along the path of written language one step at a time. Written in order and phonetically, each story focuses on specific word groups, sounds and sentence structures. Each story has a beginning, middle and an ending. Succeeding stories build on these skills and then move on to the next level of skill. The books are conceived in much the same way as the "Dick and Jane" readers of an earlier era, but with a very important difference: these stories have a touching "heart content" to them. The stories are gently humorous while honoring nature, animals and the environment. The illustrations in their warm simplicity are wonderful compliments to the stories! Whether you are rewarding an eager reader with a first experience of reading something someone else wrote, or helping a struggling reader get the hang of all those letters, these readers are sheer joy for everyone. The six books use simple words that the early reader will easily grasp. They have been carefully chosen by a reading specialist to help students advance from the short vowels to the silent "e" to the vowel combinations. At the back of each book is a list of sight words that should be reviewed with the child before reading the book. Appropriate for Grades 1-3.