Conference Program

This paper advances a theoretical-conceptual reflection on teachers’ professional identity by positioning middle leadership (Lambert, 2003; Lieberman & Miller, 2011; Lipscombe et al., 2023; Murphy, 2005) as a structural and constitutive dimension of contemporary teaching in decentralised and autonomous school systems (Altrichter, 2015; Cheng et al., 2016; Keddie, 2015), with particular attention to its implications for equity and social justice. Moving beyond managerial and hierarchical understandings, middle leadership is conceptualised as a constellation of situated professional practices through which teachers connect classroom pedagogy, organisational processes and institutional responsibility (Frost, 2008; Hunzicker, 2022). Thus, it becomes an integral component of teachers’ professional work, contributing to the educational project and public responsibility of the school.

The Italian context provides a revealing lens: school autonomy has deeply reshaped governance while leaving teachers’ leadership roles largely informal, fragmented and weakly recognised (Marsili et al., 2021). Within this configuration, teachers’ engagement in coordination, curriculum development, inclusion policies, professional learning and relationships with local communities marks an expansion of professional practice beyond the classroom. This expansion is not interpreted as a functional add-on, but as a distinctive mediation through which autonomy is translated into everyday organisational choices and pedagogical priorities consequential for students’ educational opportunities. Thus, middle leadership is interpreted as distributed leadership (Gronn, 2008; Harris, 2009), enabling teachers to negotiate the interplay between pedagogical intentions, organisational constraints and policy demands (Bufalino & Barattucci, 2020; Lupoli, 2017).

Such mediation is consequential for professional quality and for how schools address educational inequalities. Middle leadership can strengthen agency, self-efficacy and motivation by opening spaces for responsibility, professional learning and influence over institutional processes (Farchi & Tubin, 2019; Mincu, 2022). At the same time, it can produce tensions, such as workload intensification, role ambiguity and limited recognition, especially where organisational cultures are weak and contractual frameworks fail to sustain these forms of engagement (Di Martino, 2024). These ambivalences are treated as constitutive features of teachers’ lived working conditions in autonomous school systems.

A further step is to reframe middle leadership beyond organisational effectiveness alone. It is approached as a pedagogical and civic practice (Cong-Lem, 2021) through which teachers participate in governance and contribute to shared educational orientations. In doing so, they influence how inclusion, curriculum coherence and student support are enacted in everyday school life, with direct implications for the reproduction or reduction of educational inequalities: leadership practices may consolidate existing asymmetries or foster more equitable learning conditions (Priestley et al., 2015).

From this perspective, teaching appears as an inherently political profession, in which leadership practices express responsibility toward both the institution and the broader social context. Middle leadership emerges as a crucial space where professional practice, ethical commitment and institutional engagement intersect, enabling teachers to act as agents of social transformation rather than mere implementers of externally defined policies. Thus, middle leadership can be recognised and sustained as a collective, equity-oriented dimension of teachers’ professional identity within decentralised school systems, provided that organisational conditions, professional recognition and pedagogical understandings of leadership support teachers’ agency beyond the classroom.