HOW SCHOOL MIDDLE LEADERS NAVIGATE COMPETING DEMANDS

School middle leaders occupy an intermediary position in which organisational, professional, and relational expectations frequently intersect. This systematic review examines how school middle leaders navigate competing demands in their leadership practice and the organisational conditions shaping their responses. Following PRISMA 2020, the review synthesised ten empirical qualitative studies published between 2020 and 2026, identified through searches of Scopus and ERIC.An inductive thematic synthesis was conducted without imposing a predetermined conceptual framework.The findings show that competing demands commonly involve tensions between policy expectations and professional judgement, organisational priorities and teachers’ concerns, strategic responsibilities and operational work, and institutional expectations and relational commitments. Middle leaders navigate these tensions through interconnected practices of translation, negotiation, adaptation, coordination, and relational sensemaking. These practices are shaped by role position, authority, relationships, professional culture, workload, time, resources, and the wider policy environment. The review conceptualises this process as workable alignment: a situated form of agency through which middle leaders construct provisional arrangements that enable organisational work to continue without necessarily resolving underlying tensions. This perspective reframes middle-leader agency as relational and context-dependent, highlighting the organisational conditions required for competing demands to remain workable.