The importance of leadership in changing schools and building quality programs is the focus of this paper. While leadership is often seen as a management aspect of school life, the role of leadership in curriculum change may be quite different from that of school leadership vis-a-vis the principal. In small remote schools where there are many factors impacting on school reform, this paper explores curriculum leadership where the schools successfully performed against numeracy benchmarks. Features of curriculum leadership are drawn from these cases to develop a framework for considering effective leadership in remote Indigenous contexts.