The present study is a qualitative research that examines the professional identity formation of school teachers in upper secondary vocational school (vocational lyceums) andtheir views on their students. The participant teachers are teaching vocational specialties. Despite the increasing importance given by European and national education policies to vocational education and training, vocational high schools in Greece have low social prestige and they usually attract students with low academic performance. The aim of this research is to study how these teachers perceive their professional identity and how they describe the students that choose this school track.
This workaims to bring to the surface the meanings of the research participants themselves through semi- structured interviewswith eight teacherswho teach in school vocational education. The interviews were analyzed by using thematic analysis.
The results of the research show that an important element of teachers’ identity is the caring and supportive role which seem to compensate for a feeling of futility in teaching the subject and low expectations for the students’ professional future. The caring role is complementary to a perspective that treats vocational lyceum students as academically weak, with negative standards, delinquent and coming from families with many “deficiencies”. Along with the feeling of futility and low expectations, the teachers also express a feeling of devaluation that comes mainly from the parents but also from the Ministry of Education.