Leading from Outside the ‘Hierarchical Box’: Enacting the Educational Leader Role in Early Childhood Teams

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is significantly shaped by policy and an enduring focus on quality. While policy governs service provision, it is teams of educators who transform policy into practice, defining and enacting understandings of policy and quality through shared decision-making. In Australia, central to the ECEC quality agenda is the educational leader, a role positioned to guide teams of educators in decision-making. This paper examines how the educational leader role is interpreted in centre documents by services and then enacted in practice by individuals, drawing on Foucauldian-informed discourse analysis of a textual archive comprising policy documents, centre documentation, and focus group data from four Queensland long day care centres. Findings indicate a disconnect between policy intentions of the educational leader and centre-level enactment, where the role is both enabled and constrained in various ways. The educational leader is identified as enacted through five discursive practices: the educational leader as an ‘add-on’ role, no degree required, outside the ‘hierarchical box’, compliance officer, and guide and mentor. By making visible the ways centres interpret and individuals enact the role, this study presents pathways forward to revisit policy and reconsider the positioning of the educational leader in centre staffing structures.