What Makes a Pedagogical Leader in 2025?

By Tammy Lawlor, VSKEA Founder

A pedagogical leader shapes and supports the learning culture of a service, not only for children, but for the educators, families, and community around them. They bring intentionality, critical thinking, and vision to their team’s work. They’re not just managing people or ticking compliance boxes, they’re building pedagogy from the inside out. But in 2025, the role of the pedagogical leader is being tested, and transformed, by the changing landscape of early childhood education in Australia.

Reimagining Pedagogy for the Australian Context

We often look to global pioneers for inspiration:

• Montessori, with its deep focus on child-led independence

• Reggio Emilia, with its celebration of the environment as the third teacher

• Steiner-Waldorf, with its gentle rhythms and protection of childhood

These philosophies offer powerful foundations, but they can sit uneasily within the current realities of Australian early childhood education, particularly in sessional kindergarten. Many services now operate two or three 7.5-hour sessions per week, per class group. Family engagement has declined under workforce pressures. Educator workloads are heavier, planning time is eaten up by ever increasing administrative tasks, and support structures remain uneven.

Are we trying to apply beautiful philosophies to an incompatible structure? In this climate, pedagogical leadership needs to be adaptive, pragmatic, and deeply grounded in local realities, not just ideals. Pedagogical leadership in 2025 isn’t about chasing perfection. It’s about creating coherence, between philosophy, practice, and the everyday realities of educators’ lives.

Pedagogical Leadership in Practice: What It Looks Like in 2025

You might recognise these qualities in yourself or the leaders around you. Today’s pedagogical leaders are:

• Strategic thinkers: aligning pedagogy with staffing, budgets, and operational realities.

• Weathered and wise: managing change and complexity without burning out.

• Collaborative planners: involving all educators, including co-educators, in meaningful program decisions.

• Public communicators: sharing vision with families, committees, and community partners

• System navigators: balancing regulation, funding, and reform expectations

• Reflective decision-makers: knowing when to hold space for growth, and when to let go of what no longer serves the team or children

This isn’t just leading the program. It’s leading through pedagogy by navigating complexity, constraint, and ongoing reform.

From Teacher to Leader: The Hidden Skillset

Many of the strengths honed in teaching translate powerfully into leadership, even if they’re rarely named.

• Managing uncertainty → Navigating complexity

• Differentiating learning → Adapting leadership to individuals

• Running a room → Running a meeting

• Documenting learning → Articulating outcomes to boards and funders

• Observing children → Observing staff and service culture

• Managing transitions → Leading change

• Knowing when to pivot → Knowing when to call time on a project, role, or practice

These aren’t “soft skills.” Rather they’re structural, steady capacities that hold teams together through uncertainty, guide decisions under pressure, and sustain vision when the work gets heavy. And yet, while we recognise these qualities in practice, they’re not always valued in structure. Under VECTEA 2020 Clause 45, the Educational Leader (Regulation 118) is formally defined as being responsible for pedagogical leadership, mentoring, program design, and quality improvement. But in many services, this role is allocated just one hour per week, a vivid example of the mismatch between the scope of responsibility and the support provided.

This gap highlights the real issue: leadership in early childhood isn’t only about capability, it’s about conditions. To make pedagogical leadership sustainable, we need to reimagine not only the role itself, but the broader systems and conditions in which it operates.

The Bigger Picture: Where Is ECEC Heading?

Reforms such as Best Start, Best Life, expanded free kindergarten, and renewed workforce initiatives are rapidly reshaping the sector. The question is no longer just who leads, but how, and under what conditions.

Across Australia, new system-level roles are emerging. Positions that oversee pedagogy across multiple services, teams, and communities. These roles demand strategic thinking, workforce insight, and a deep understanding of practice. This is the next phase of pedagogical leadership: cross-service, informed by systems thinking, and deeply connected to quality improvement. It’s no longer about leading the program. It’s about designing and sustaining whole-team pedagogy in real-world conditions.

Pedagogical Leadership and the Digital Shift

As planning and documentation tools become increasingly digital, and AI begins to assist with observation summaries, data analysis, and compliance tracking, pedagogical leaders face new questions:

• How can technology and AI serve our relationships with families and teams, rather than supplant them?

• How do we use data meaningfully, without reducing learning to metrics?

• How do we keep reflection, not automation, at the heart of our pedagogy?

The challenge for 2025 isn’t adopting every new tool. It’s knowing which ones truly serve our pedagogy, and which distract from it. Leading with discernment will be key: using digital tools to enhance reflection and collaboration, while protecting the humanity at the heart of early childhood education.

Leadership, Grounded in Practice

Pedagogical leadership in 2025 is less about vision boards and more about values-based action. It’s knowing that:

• Documentation isn’t just for assessment, it’s a mirror for pedagogy,

• Team meetings aren’t just logistics, they’re where culture is built,

• Children learn best in environments where educators feel safe, supported, and seen.

Leadership isn’t the end of the teaching journey, it’s a new chapter. One that draws on every skill honed on the floor, in the moment, and at the edge of what’s possible.

So, What Makes a Pedagogical Leader in 2025?

They’re the ones holding both vision and structure.
Supporting others while navigating change.
And continually asking the hardest question of all:

Where are we going, and who are we taking with us?