This paper arises from a doctoral study in which the author used an action research approach in which he collaborated with a range of professionals and government officials to develop a programme of support for teacher leadership in Istanbul. The project involved more than three hundred teachers in fifty schools in the public education system in Turkey. The paper briefly discusses a conceptual framework for school improvement which is based on the idea of teacher leadership, and provides an evaluation of the programme. The paper’s contribution to the symposium is that it provides robust evidence that teacher leadership could be an important and viable alternative to school reform within hierarchical education systems where reforms are often achieved in a top-down and command-control manner. The cultural context within which this research was conducted will be discussed, and the implications for education reform in similar cultures on Europe’s periphery will be drawn.