A New Approach to Nursery Leadership Development Built From Real Experience

Why current leadership training is not keeping up with nurseries

Many nursery owners and managers tell us the same thing. Leadership training exists, but it often does not fully reflect the reality of running a setting day to day.

Traditional routes such as Level 5 qualifications remain valuable for building foundational knowledge. However, they are often delivered in a way that is more theory based than practice led, which can leave a gap when managers step into real operational responsibility.

Across the Early Years sector, leadership is consistently identified as one of the biggest pressure points for providers. Workforce reports continue to highlight that a significant proportion of new managers feel underprepared for areas such as HR, staffing decisions, compliance and operational leadership when they first move into role.

At the same time, many employers are seeing the impact of this gap through:

• increased pressure on owners to step in operationally
• inconsistency in leadership confidence across settings
• challenges with staff retention linked to management capability

It is clear that leadership development needs to go further than knowledge alone.

How we arrived at the need for change

It emerged gradually through ongoing conversations across the sector and our own experience working within Early Years settings. As we spoke more with nursery leaders and reflected on what we were seeing across different environments, a clear pattern began to form. The challenges were not isolated or setting specific. They were consistent.

That is when we decided to take a more structured approach. Rather than making assumptions about what was needed, we began to actively explore it in more depth with the people doing the role every day.

Listening more deeply through research and round tables

From there, we brought nursery owners, managers and senior leaders together for a series of structured conversations and a dedicated round table discussion hosted by Swift Childcare.

The purpose was simple. To understand leadership from the inside out, not from a training or policy perspective.

What came through strongly was the reality of the role in practice. Managers described stepping into positions where they were immediately responsible for staffing, HR, safeguarding, compliance and operational decision making, often while still building confidence in leadership itself.

A significant proportion of participants, around 70 per cent, said they would benefit from more practical leadership support that reflects real day to day nursery life.

Jack Edwards, Operations Director at Swift Childcare, reflected on this clearly:

“What stood out was not just the complexity of the role, but how often managers are expected to handle it without structured support in some of the most demanding areas of leadership.”

What this confirmed about existing training routes

What became clear through these conversations was not that existing training routes lack value, but that they do not always reflect how quickly the role has evolved.

Qualifications such as the Level 5 Early Years Lead Practitioner Apprenticeship continue to provide an essential foundation of knowledge and remain an important step in professional development.

However, many leaders told us that there is still a gap between understanding leadership and applying it confidently in real time situations.

In particular, areas such as:

• managing staff performance and difficult conversations
• handling HR and operational pressures
• making consistent day to day decisions
• linking leadership capability to team stability

were consistently highlighted as development needs.

What this led us to create

From this combination of sector experience, ongoing conversations and structured research, the need for something different became clear.

Not a replacement for existing training, but something that bridges the gap between knowledge and practice.