The Leadership–Quality Nexus in a Centralised Education System: How Participatory and Pedagogical Leadership Shape Teachers’ Work

Educational leadership may shape the quality of educational work indirectly by influencing the organisational conditions in which teachers collaborate, exercise professional agency and learn. This qualitative interpretive study explored how ten teachers in Greek public primary schools perceived leadership and its relationship with educational work in a centralised system. Semi-structured interviews were analysed using an iterative thematic approach that combined inductive coding with comparison to established leadership concepts. Reported procedures included a common interview protocol, reflexive journaling, documentation of analytical decisions and an audit trail. The available study materials do not establish participant transcript review or independent double-coding, so these procedures are not claimed. The findings indicate that participatory, relational and pedagogical practices coexist with administrative and compliance-oriented demands. Teachers associated meaningful participation, relational trust, open communication and pedagogical support with stronger collaboration and professional learning, while describing administrative workload, limited school-level discretion and predetermined decisions as constraints. Building on these accounts, the paper proposes a theoretically informed leadership–quality conversion framework comprising participatory agency, relational-professional capacity and pedagogical enablement. These mechanisms are presented as an interpretive proposition for further empirical examination, not as a validated causal model. Because the study examines teachers’ perceptions rather than independently measured teaching or student outcomes, claims about educational quality are limited to perceived conditions and processes of educational work.