Emotional Labour and Early Years Leadership
Why We Need to Talk about Support
Leading an early years setting can be an incredibly rewarding experience, but there’s no doubt that it also brings a wide range of emotional demands.
Leaders manage the anxieties of parents, the pressures faced by staff, and the daily pressures of working with young children, while also managing their own emotional responses to the role.
This work is significant, yet it is often unrecognised in both status and pay.
The Hidden Emotional Demands of Leading Early Years Settings
My doctoral research at the University of Worcester looks closely at leadership within Private, Voluntary and Independent (PVI) early years settings, and one of the clearest findings to emerge from this work is how much emotional labour shapes the experience of leadership, often without any formal acknowledgement.
Before beginning this research, I led a nursery setting myself, taking it from an inadequate Ofsted judgement to an outstanding one.
That experience gave me a first-hand understanding of what leadership in this sector demands, and it influenced many of the questions I have gone on to explore in my research.
One of the questions my research raises is where responsibility for this emotional labour sits.
Too often, the expectation is that leaders find their own way of managing it, requiring high levels of personal resilience rather than any structural support.
This places the burden on the individual rather than on the setting, and it means that leaders can go for long periods without any safe space to process what the role asks of them.
Supervision Protects Staff — So Why Not Leaders?
Supervision offers one obvious point of comparison here. The process is a legal requirement under the EYFS for staff who work directly with children.
The framework states that providers must have appropriate supervision arrangements for staff who have contact with children and families, with effective supervision offering practitioners support, coaching and training.
This is a meaningful protection for staff, and it recognises that working with children and families involves an emotional dimension that needs a formal outlet.
The question this raises for leaders is straightforward: If supervision exists because working with children and families is emotionally demanding, why does this recognition so rarely extend upward to those managing the setting?
In many cases, leaders are the ones delivering supervision to their teams rather than receiving anything comparable themselves.
The formal structures that protect staff wellbeing often stop at the point where leadership begins.
Take a Moment to Reflect…
If you lead a setting, when did you last have a space of your own to discuss the emotional demands of your role, separate from performance management or operational meetings?
Is there anyone in your organisation with responsibility for your own supervision, or does that responsibility disappear once you take on a leadership title?
If there is no formal mechanism in place, what informal arrangements have you built for yourself, and are they enough?
These questions are important because the answers will influence what leadership feels like day to day.
Rethinking How We Support Early Years Leaders
My research suggests that governance structures themselves have a role to play here.
How a setting is organised, resourced, and overseen has a direct bearing on whether emotional labour is recognised as part of the job or left for individual leaders to manage on their own terms.
This suggests that this is not just about coping strategies but rather a structural issue that requires attention at the level of policy and provision.
As an academic researcher and also a senior lecturer at University College Birmingham, I’m interested in your experiences of leadership in your setting.
I understand that leaders across the sector are managing significant emotional demands, often without formal recognition or support, and this has consequences for retention, wellbeing, and the sustainability of leadership as a career choice within Early Years.
I would encourage anyone reading this to think about their own access to support, and to consider raising the question of formal supervision or reflective practice for leaders within their own organisation.
If you would be interested in discussing the issues raised in this blog, please contact Emma directly: e.davis@ucb.ac.uk
Emma Davis – Senior Lecturer & Programme Leader, University College Birmingham
Emma Davis is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for the BA (Hons) Early Childhood Studies at University College Birmingham.
Before moving into higher education, she spent many years leading in early years practice, including taking a nursery from an inadequate Ofsted judgement to outstanding.
She has recently submitted her PhD at the University of Worcester, which explores how leaders in the PVI sector experience support and what more they need.
Emma writes regularly for sector publications such as Nursery World and Early Years Educator, and she is currently writing a book for Routledge on ethical leadership and management in early years.
Interested in writing a guest post for the BEYN blog? Visit the Write for Us page for more info.
