Leading schools from the Middle. Middle leadership in a context of Distributed leadership

Current education reforms have resulted in enhanced responsibilities and accountabilities for all schools while leadership responsibility is now stretched over a range of different actors. Following with this, the centrality of distributed leadership reinforces the importance of the middle tier to generate improvement and to influence teaching and learning processes in schools. Unfortunately this is not the case of Italy, where any attempt to introduce and recognize intermediate layers of management have been unsuccessful. In this sense, Italy lacks an organizational component that the literature has identified as crucial to improving the quality of education. By reviewing international studies in the field of school leadership, the author will discuss middle management in schools in relation to the current discourse on distributed leadership in the attempt to pave a debate on middle leadership in Italy.