Empiric studies about leadership have provided a compilation of guidelines and models to achieve a fairer school. However, the key question to discuss what the main goal of a fairer school is. Social Justice is a concept that has been developed across time and contexts, but let us propose what Hernández-Castilla, Slater & Martínez-Recio (2014) perspective with the classic three-dimension definition Fraser (2009), (Redistribution of goods and resources, the Recognition of culture and people, social participation and Representation) with an Ecosocial Justice, environmental and developmental issues. This complex social justice term is aligned precisely with the goals United Nations has proposed in their Agenda 2030. This agenda, which is settled on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), aims to develop basic capacities to obtain a better good, into a freedom framework approved by United Nations Geral Assembly (2015).

Thus, education, and consequently school, has a clear role in achieving both social justice and SDGs. Even if it can reproduce inequalities, Education can help to social mobility, allowing everybody’s inclusion, particularly those at a social disadvantage and improving their work conditions, health indicators, and helping to get more active citizenship.

This fight for justice gets more imperative in schools with unfair backgrounds. In these, school leadership becomes a significant issue. Leaders in these schools act to eradicate inequities, against public policies and organizational cultures that help to create an unfair and discriminating educational system. The research nowadays tries to explain which should be the main skills these leaders must master. For example, Murillo & Hernández-Castilla (2015) and Silva, Antunez & Slater (2020) stated the importance of the ability to create a strong cohesion with a shared goal between the community and to think outside-the-box against unfair rooted routines. Other important traits for a leader fighting for social justice are participation and commitment to whole children's development in schools, not only for the standardized test results (Moraes, Manoel, Batista-Dias & Holanda-Mariano, 2020; Hernández-Castilla, Murillo & Hidalgo, 2017). These traits are found to be significant in schools with high needs (Klar et al., 2020).

Describing social justice leaders, it is usual to relate the leadership role, skills, attitudes, and values. However, it is important to distinguish between roles and identities. Crow, Day & Møller (2017) state that “roles are scripted, deterministic and static, whereas identities are improvisational, emphasize human agency and are dynamic” (p. 266). Although the roles are the main characteristics a leader must develop and carry out, identities are the motivations to enact those roles. Hence, it becomes crucial to understand how the identity of a leader is constructed.

Identities are constructed all along with our lives, are shaped by our efforts and our experiences, and are constantly negotiated. Their stability relies on the capacities of teachers to manage the professional, the socially located, and the personal dimension of their identities, within a large number of competing scenarios (Bogotch, 2011; Hernández-Castilla & Murillo, 2014; Jean-Marie, Normore & Brooks, 2009). Ritacco Real & Bolívar Botía (2018) stated that teachers’ professional identities are constructed by their own experiences (thus, their biography) and their social, cultural, and institutional background interaction. For example, Cruz-González, Segovia & Rodríguez (2019) found out that principals working in challenging environments adopt innovative leadership practices, as they adopted an identity committed to values of social justice. In Spain, the role and identity of principalship are not tightly correlated, and teachers don’t feel that the principal is an innovative or pedagogic leader, but a paperwork manager (Moral et al., 2019).

The study is part of the R&D project named “Escuelas para la Justicia Social” (Ref. EDU2011-29114)”. The objectives of this project were: a) to describe a theoretically substantiate the characteristics of leadership for Social Justice from a perspective that assumes new paradigms such as the epistemologies of the South; b) to locate educational centers in Spain and Latin America whose schools fight for Social Justice: c) to describe the characteristics of this leadership, as well as its values; d) to understand the identity elements of the principals for Social Justice. With this last aim, three different principals from public schools in the Comunidad de Madrid (Spain) were interviewed. These schools were located in socially challenging and high culturally diverse backgrounds. One of these are Primary Schools (6-12 years old) and the other two are Secondary Schools (12-18 years old). These principals were asked about both personal features and traits. Also, about organization and aspects related to the school culture. The biographic-narrative methodology is a hermeneutic method that requires a four-sided work: the narrator of their story, the researcher that studies the story, the text containing the story itself, and the final reader who closes the interpretation. The data have been analyzed following the method proposed by Hernández-Castilla, Murillo & Hidalgo (2017). This process aided with Atlas. ti 8 software, consisted of the following steps: 1.- Generation of the Hermeneutic Unit, in which the different documents were categorized and filed. 2.- Data reduction, analyzing the frequency of the terms and choosing the citations that best fitted with the goal of the research. 3.- Codification of the data, following the categories chosen for the analysis. 4.- Construction of a model, by generating semantic networks linking codes, super-codes, and big categories. 5.- Extraction of conclusions. To determine the categories used to analyze the interviews, the article by Saarukka (2014) about principal identities in Sweeden, was used as a reference. The apriori categories are, hence, as follows: 1.- Personal timeline: a) childhood, b) adolescence, c) youth, d) maturity, e) present. 2.- Leadership according to person) profession and confirmation from colleagues, b) personal traits, c) necessary knowledge, d) personal ambitions. 3.- Leadership according to the profession: a) leadership abilities, b) human resource management, c) professional skills. 4.- Leadership according to position: a) trust and respect, b) independence and autonomy, c) public position.

In Spain, as explained by Ritacco Real & Bolívar Botía (2018), the professional identities of principals are constructed as a consequence of their teaching vocation. Unlike other countries, as France, where principalship is a career, in Spain principals are chosen between teachers that, for different reasons, decide to take that role. This is what happened with the principals interviewed: they all decided to take the principalship after teaching for some years, although the circumstances for it were not the same. However, they all demonstrated a strong commitment to education. All three biographies, although very different, had some similarities that help to understand the decision towards principalship. First, their families had a strong sense of freedom, autonomy, and responsibility. This is the seed of the skills that are essential for appropriate leadership, for example, the ability to create a strong sense of community and to be creative and innovative against injustices (Silva, Antunez & Slater, 2020). Also, all three of them were strongly aware of the weight education has to fight social injustice, which was perceived in the models they practiced leadership. They all had lived similar experiences of unfairness, which made them realize how important a fair school is and the central role an adequate leadership has, similar to what was experienced by principals leading in challenging environments (Cruz-González, Segovia & Rodríguez,2019). Overall, it is interesting to highlight that they all managed to merge their biography, thus, all they had lived, with the role of principal. This helped them to build up the optimal identity to answer the challenges of a changing role (Crow, Day & Møller, 2017). As Morwena Griffiths (1998) proposes, Social justice is composed not just by individual empowerment but also by structural change. Research about Education for Social Justice, hence, works these two objectives.

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