Early Years Leadership: Leading People and Practice

A Unique Leadership Context

Leading an early years setting presents challenges that are distinct from leadership in other phases of education. The workforce is often younger and less experienced, the emotional demands are intense, and the regulatory landscape is complex. Settings operate on tight margins, staff-to-child ratios leave little room for absence, and the physical and emotional demands of working with very young children create unique pressures on teams.

Yet early years leadership is also an extraordinary opportunity. The decisions made by leaders in these settings have a profound and lasting impact on children's development, family engagement, and practitioner wellbeing. Research consistently demonstrates that the quality of early years provision has effects that persist throughout a child's educational journey and beyond. The leader who gets it right is not just running a setting — they are shaping futures.

Key Leadership Competencies

Through our work with early years leaders across the country, we have identified four competencies that consistently distinguish effective leadership in this context:

Relational Intelligence

The ability to build trust and navigate complex interpersonal dynamics. In early years settings, this extends far beyond the team to include relationships with families (who are entrusting you with their youngest children), local authority contacts, multi-agency partners, and increasingly, Ofsted inspectors. Each of these relationships requires a different register, a different kind of trust, and a different set of skills.

Relational intelligence also means understanding the emotional dynamics within your team — who feels safe, who feels marginalised, where the alliances and tensions lie, and how the unspoken norms shape behaviour more powerfully than any policy.

Pedagogical Confidence

A deep understanding of child development that informs all decision-making. This is not about knowing the theory — it is about living it in every interaction and every decision. When a leader makes a resourcing choice, designs a room layout, or responds to a parent concern, their understanding of child development should be the invisible framework guiding every response.

Pedagogical confidence also means being willing to challenge practice that does not serve children, even when it is established, popular, or easier to ignore. This requires courage as well as knowledge.

Systems Thinking

The capacity to see how individual issues connect to broader organisational patterns. A child's challenging behaviour, a practitioner's burnout, and a policy gap may all be symptoms of the same underlying dynamic. Leaders who can see these connections are able to address root causes rather than endlessly managing symptoms.

Systems thinking means asking: what is the pattern here? rather than who is the problem? It means looking at how structures, processes, and cultures create the conditions for the issues you observe, rather than locating the cause in individual people.

Reflective Modelling

Demonstrating the reflective practice they expect from their teams. Leaders who share their own learning journeys — including their uncertainties, mistakes, and ongoing development — create permission for others to do the same. This is perhaps the most powerful leadership tool available: the willingness to be publicly imperfect in the pursuit of genuine growth.

The Leadership Development Journey

Leadership development in the early years is not a single training event — it is an ongoing journey that unfolds in recognisable phases:

Phase One: Self-Awareness

Understanding your own leadership style, strengths, and inherited patterns. Every leader brings their own history into their role — their experiences of being led (well and badly), their default responses to stress and conflict, and their assumptions about what leadership looks like. This phase is about making those unconscious patterns conscious, so they become choices rather than automatic responses.

Key questions for this phase: What kind of leader am I when things are going well? What kind of leader do I become under pressure? Where did I learn those patterns?

Phase Two: Team Awareness

Developing the skills to read team dynamics and create conditions for effective collaboration. This phase moves beyond individual self-knowledge to understanding the team as a system with its own patterns, norms, and dynamics. It includes learning to facilitate rather than direct, to create safety rather than compliance, and to hold space for the emotional reality of the work.

Key questions for this phase: What are the unspoken rules in my team? Where does power really sit? What conversations are we not having?

Phase Three: Systems Awareness

Learning to see the bigger picture and lead change at an organisational level. This phase addresses the structural and cultural elements that shape everything else — policies, processes, communication systems, relationships with external partners, and the setting's relationship to the wider community and sector.

Key questions for this phase: What systemic patterns keep producing the same outcomes? What would need to change at the structural level to create different results? How do I lead change without burning out?

The Loneliness of Leadership

One of the least discussed aspects of early years leadership is its isolation. Many leaders, particularly in smaller settings, have no peer group within their organisation. They carry the weight of regulatory compliance, financial management, parent relationships, and staff wellbeing — often without anyone to debrief with at the end of the day.

This is why we believe so strongly in creating spaces where leaders can reflect together — not in competition, but in genuine solidarity. Our programmes bring leaders together to share their experience, challenge their thinking, and remind each other that they are not alone in this work.