What the Sector Staffing Crisis Is Telling Us About Leadership Culture
- Sarah Moore
- Jul 29
- 5 min read
The early childhood sector has been talking about its staffing crisis for several years now. The numbers are real, the pressures are real, and the conversations are everywhere: in sector forums, in policy reviews, in the inboxes of directors trying to fill rooms with qualified educators who are increasingly hard to find and even harder to keep.
Most of the public conversation focuses on wages and conditions. And wages and conditions matter. They are part of the picture, and the sector deserves better on both counts. But I have been working with early childhood leaders for long enough to know that the wages conversation, important as it is, is not the whole story.
When I sit with leaders who are thinking about leaving, or who have recently made that decision, the conversations rarely begin with pay. They begin somewhere else entirely. And I think it is worth pausing on that.
What People Are Actually Saying When They Leave
Over the years, I have had countless conversations with educators and leaders who are at the point of walking away from the sector. Some are exhausted. Some are disillusioned. Some are grieving the version of this work they fell in love with, which feels increasingly hard to find in the reality of their day.
What comes up, again and again, is not primarily about money. It is about feeling like the work no longer makes sense. About carrying significant responsibility without adequate recognition or support. About policies that arrive on a Friday afternoon before a two-week holiday, with no consultation, no context, and no acknowledgment of the load they add to people who are already stretched. About being asked to do more, continuously, while being trusted less.
There is a particular kind of fatigue that comes not from the work itself, but from working in a system that feels like it is moving in the opposite direction from your values. When the thing that brought you into early childhood, the deep belief that this work matters, that children deserve presence and care and intentional relationship, begins to feel impossible to honour within the structures you are working inside, something in a person starts to let go.
The Leadership Culture Layer
Here is the part I want to name carefully, because I know it is sensitive. The staffing crisis is not only a systemic or governmental problem. Part of it lives inside services, in the leadership culture that educators experience every day.
This is not about blame. Most early childhood leaders are carrying enormous weight themselves. They are navigating compliance pressures, staffing shortages, parent expectations, and their own professional isolation, often with very little support. They are doing their best inside a system that is not making it easy for anyone.
But the culture inside a service, how people are led, how they are spoken to, whether their professional judgment is trusted, whether they feel seen and valued or managed and monitored, is one of the strongest predictors of whether an educator stays or goes. Research on retention across industries consistently points to the same finding: people leave managers, not jobs. In early childhood, that truth carries particular weight.
An educator who works in a service where they are mentored well, where their growth is genuinely invested in, where hard conversations happen with care and honesty rather than avoidance or harshness, and where they feel like a professional contributor rather than a compliance unit, is far more likely to stay. Not because they are oblivious to wages and workload, but because meaning and belonging are powerful anchors. When they are present, people find ways to hold on. When they are absent, no pay rise fully compensates.
People leave managers, not jobs.
In early childhood, that truth carries particular weight.
The System Leaders Are Working Inside
I also want to name the other side of this, because it would be incomplete not to. Early childhood leaders are being asked to build cultures of trust, psychological safety, and relational wellbeing inside a system that does not always model those things toward them.
The skills that make a great early childhood leader, the capacity to listen well, to regulate under pressure, to hold complexity without reactivity, to invest in people over the long term rather than demanding short-term compliance, are precisely the skills that the broader system struggles to demonstrate toward the leaders themselves. And that is a significant thing to hold.
It takes real clarity about your own purpose and values to keep leading well from that position. To continue investing in your team’s growth and wellbeing when your own growth and wellbeing are not being invested in. To stay curious and relational when the pressure coming from above is not curious or relational. That is not a small ask. And I do not think the sector acknowledges it often enough.
What Leaders Can Actually Influence
There is a great deal that individual leaders cannot control. They cannot set national wages. They cannot simplify the regulatory framework. They cannot stop the Friday afternoon policy drops. And they deserve more from those who can make those changes.
What leaders can influence, and this is the part worth focusing energy on, is the culture inside their service. The daily quality of the relationships they build with their team. The degree to which educators feel genuinely seen, heard, and developed. The kind of conversations that happen when something goes wrong. The presence and steadiness a leader brings into a room under pressure.
These things matter. They are not a substitute for systemic change, and I am not suggesting that leaders simply absorb what the system fails to address. But in a sector where so much is outside individual control, the relational culture of a service is something leaders genuinely shape. And it is, for many educators, the difference between staying and leaving.
The staffing crisis is telling us something. It is worth listening to the whole message.
Reflective Questions
These questions are an invitation to sit with, not to answer quickly:
Q1. When educators leave your service, what do the exit conversations (or the things not said in them) reveal about the experience of working there?
Q2. What is the story your team would tell about what it feels like to be led by you? What parts of that story feel aligned with your intentions, and what parts might surprise you?
Q3. Where in your own leadership experience do you feel genuinely supported? Where do you feel the gap between what you are asked to give and what you are given in return?
Q4. If you could change one thing about the culture inside your service this term, and this term only, what would it be?
A Final Thought
The people who came into early childhood did not do so for an easy path. They came because they believed in something: in the importance of the early years, in the difference that a skilled, caring, present educator can make in a child’s life. That belief is not a small thing. It is a resource. And it is worth protecting.
The sector will not solve its staffing crisis through wages alone. It will solve it, over time, by building the kinds of environments where people who came in with that belief are genuinely supported to keep it alive. That work is systemic, and it is also deeply local. It lives inside every service, in the quality of the culture its leader is willing to build and protect.
If this reflection resonates with you:
The Conscious Leaders Mastermind is a space for directors and senior leaders in early childhood to think clearly, lead intentionally, and stay connected to the work that brought them here, alongside peers who understand the specific weight of what they are carrying. If you are curious about whether it is right for you, I would love to have a conversation.
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