When Authority and Accountability Are Separated, Leadership Becomes Impossible
In early learning, leadership failure is often framed as an individual problem. When outcomes slip, attention turns quickly to the attitudes, resilience, or competence of those closest to the work. More training is prescribed. More documentation is demanded. More oversight is imposed.What is discussed far less openly is the structural context in which these leaders operate.
Across the sector, authority is increasingly centralised while accountability is pushed downward. Decisions about staffing, class sizes, remuneration, and risk tolerance are made remotely, while responsibility for quality, safety, and compliance is carried locally. This separation is not an interpersonal issue, nor an industrial one. It is a governance failure, and it is quietly eroding leadership capacity across early learning.
Responsibility without power is not leadership. When individuals are held accountable for outcomes they lack the authority to influence, decision-making becomes performative rather than purposeful. In early learning services, this misalignment has become normalised. Local leaders and educators are expected to deliver high-quality pedagogy, manage complex health and safety environments, sustain workforce morale, and maintain community trust, all while operating within tightly constrained decision-making frameworks. This creates a culture of downward accountability. Risk, responsibility, and blame travel toward the classroom, while authority remains fixed elsewhere. The result is not improved outcomes. It is risk displacement.
Risk management is essential in early childhood education. Children deserve safe environments, and educators deserve clear frameworks to support sound judgement. But when risk minimisation is detached from professional reasoning, it ceases to be protective and becomes bureaucratic. Let’s consider the proliferation of individualised risk management plans for common, foreseeable conditions. Five children in a single class, all with asthma, require five separate Risk Minimisation Plans, despite identical triggers, identical mitigation strategies, and identical responses. The administrative burden is substantial. The reduction in actual risk is marginal. From a systems perspective, this is not risk management. It is risk transfer.
Documentation does not reduce risk when the underlying conditions remain unchanged. What it does do is relocate responsibility. Risk is rendered visible, auditable, and localised, while the structural drivers of that risk, staffing pressure, class size expansion, workload intensification, are left untouched. This is not leadership. It is liability choreography.
Leadership scholar Ronald Heifetz draws a critical distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges. Technical problems can be solved with existing knowledge and processes. Adaptive challenges require changes to values, norms, priorities, and power relationships. Workforce sustainability is an adaptive challenge. Educator burnout is an adaptive challenge. Maintaining pedagogical quality under conditions of increasing demand and constrained resources is an adaptive challenge… Yet these are repeatedly treated as technical problems.
The response is familiar: new templates, revised procedures, additional compliance layers, expanded risk documentation. The appearance of control increases. The reality of capacity declines. Educators are asked to do more with less, larger classes, frozen wages, unpaid sideway promotions, rising expectations, all while simultaneously absorbing expanding bureaucratic workloads. Leadership is reduced to compliance management. Professional judgement becomes a liability rather than an asset. This is how systems exhaust their most capable people while insisting the problem lies with “implementation”.
Decisions to increase class sizes or hold wages static are rarely framed as pedagogical or leadership issues. They are positioned as operational or financial necessities. Their consequences, however, are profoundly local. Educators and leaders are tasked with maintaining safety, relational pedagogy, inclusion, and learning outcomes in environments that are materially more complex and more pressured than before. When these pressures collide with compliance saturation, the gap between expectation and agency becomes unmanageable. This is the point at which leadership collapses into survival. Not because leaders lack skill or commitment, but because systems have been designed to constrain rather than enable judgement.
Contemporary education leadership theory emphasises distributed leadership: the idea that expertise, insight, and decision-making should sit as close as possible to the work itself. In practice, many early learning systems adopt the language of distributed leadership while withholding its substance. Authority is centralised in the name of consistency. Autonomy is restricted in the name of risk reduction. Local knowledge is sidelined in the name of standardisation. What remains is not distributed leadership, but distributed responsibility. Leaders are expected to own outcomes without shaping inputs. Educators are expected to exercise judgement without discretion. This is not a failure of leadership culture, it is a failure of governance design.
Over time, sustained misalignment between expectations and authority erodes professional judgement. Educators learn that discretion invites scrutiny. Leaders learn that initiative carries risk. Compliance becomes the safest path, not because it is effective, but because it is defensible. Leadership literature increasingly describes this experience as moral injury: the distress that arises when professionals are prevented from acting in accordance with their values due to systemic constraints. In early learning, this injury is often invisible. It presents as fatigue, disengagement, cynicism, or attrition. It is misdiagnosed as resilience failure or skills deficit. The structural origins remain unexamined. But no amount of professional development can resolve a problem of misaligned power.
In systems where authority and accountability have drifted apart, corrective structures are required. Advisory boards are one such mechanism. They are not political statements, nor are they acts of defiance. They are a governance response to structural imbalance.
When designed well, advisory boards do not undermine central oversight. They strengthen it. They provide a formal conduit through which local knowledge, professional expertise, and contextual understanding can inform decision-making without collapsing lines of accountability. They are a way of restoring dialogue between those who carry responsibility and those who hold authority. In sectors that value learning, this is not controversial. It is standard practice.
The Cost of Not Fixing This
Early learning does not suffer from a lack of commitment. It suffers from governance arrangements that confuse control with safety and documentation with leadership. When systems rely on compliance saturation to manage risk, they externalise responsibility while hollowing out professional agency. Leadership becomes impossible not because people are unwilling to lead, but because they are structurally prevented from doing so. Until authority and accountability are realigned, no volume of paperwork will deliver the outcomes it promises. Leadership cannot thrive in systems designed to constrain it.
Tammy Lawlor
VSKEA President and Founder