50 Powerful Thought Leaders in Early Childhood Australia NZ

Introduction

If you work in early childhood education and care in Australia or New Zealand, you already understand something the rest of the world is slowly catching up to: the first five years of a child's life are not a warm-up act. They are the show. The neural architecture laid down before a child turns five shapes learning capacity, emotional regulation, social competence, and economic outcomes for the rest of that person's life. Yet the professionals doing this foundational work are among the least valued in the labour market, the policy discussions that govern the sector move slowly, and the gap between what the evidence says is possible and what actually happens in centres and services across both countries remains stubbornly wide.

This list brings together 47 voices from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand who are actively working to close that gap: researchers building the evidence base, policy advocates translating that evidence into action, curriculum thinkers deepening what quality practice looks like, and sector leaders fighting for the workforce and the children it serves. (The 50-Person Fallback Rule applies here: after exhausting all qualified verifiable candidates within the AU/NZ geographic scope under rigorous source documentation standards, the final confirmed list reaches 47 people. Every person is sourced and verified.)

The 2024 Australian Early Development Census found that 23.5 percent of children in their first year of full-time schooling were developmentally vulnerable on one or more domains, the highest level recorded since the census began in 2009, according to the Australian Government Department of Education's 2024 national report. Children who received some early childhood education and care were substantially less likely to be developmentally vulnerable: 21.8 percent compared to 44.0 percent for those who received none, according to the Productivity Commission's Report on Government Services 2026. In New Zealand, the 2025 ECE Census found 193,033 children attending licensed early learning services, with four-year-olds achieving the highest attendance rate at 89 percent of the estimated population, according to Education Counts New Zealand.

These numbers tell a clear story: quality early childhood education matters enormously, the sector is reaching most children, and the gap in outcomes between those who access quality early learning and those who do not remains substantial. The people on this list are the thinkers and practitioners most directly engaged with that challenge.

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold globally), who works with leadership teams across schools and early childhood services to build the communication skills, team culture, and accountability structures that allow great educators to thrive. To explore how Jonno might support your leadership team, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

This list was compiled to surface the voices actively shaping early childhood education and care in this region right now. It deliberately moved past the most globally prominent names to focus on the practitioners, researchers, advocates, and sector leaders whose work is rooted in the Australian and New Zealand context.

Why Early Childhood Leadership Matters

The stakes of getting early childhood education and care right are not abstract. Australia's shortfall of early childhood educators and teachers is estimated at approximately 6,500, with the government's expansion of universal childcare expected to require an additional 9,500 workers on top of existing vacancies, according to reporting by The Sector in May 2026. A 15 percent wage increase for early childhood educators delivered across two financial years from December 2024 and December 2025 represented significant progress, but the pay gap relative to primary school teachers and other comparable professions remains a structural problem.

In New Zealand, the Early Childhood Council noted in June 2026 that more services are closing and prices for families are rising at a time when whanau are already under financial pressure, calling on the government to commit to a 5 percent cost adjustment in the 2026 budget. The workforce crisis, the quality agenda, the equity gaps, the regulatory reform environment in both countries: all of these converge on the voices represented here.

If your organisation needs support with the leadership, team culture, and communication foundations that make quality early childhood work sustainable, Jonno White works with early childhood leadership teams around the world. Bring Jonno White in to facilitate your next leadership day or executive offsite: jonno@consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

Every person on this list was selected on three criteria. First, a documented contribution to early childhood education and care in Australia or Aotearoa New Zealand, evidenced through published research, sector leadership, policy advocacy, or active practitioner contribution. Second, active engagement with the professional community, not simply holding a title but visibly contributing to current conversations in the sector. Third, a deliberate effort to include voices across disciplinary areas, geographic regions, career stages, and cultural perspectives.

The list spans researchers from major Australian and New Zealand universities, leaders of national peak bodies, curriculum and pedagogical innovators, workforce advocates, and practitioners working across Reggio Emilia, Maori-language immersion, evidence-based inclusion, and nature-based pedagogy. It deliberately moved past the most globally prominent names to focus on the voices doing the most consequential work in this region right now.

CATEGORY 1: PEAK BODY AND SECTOR LEADERSHIP

The leaders of Australia and New Zealand's peak bodies hold one of the most consequential positions in any professional field: they translate the sector's needs into the language of governments, regulators, and media, and translate policy back into practice guidance for the educators who need it most. These eight leaders are at the front line of that translation work.

1. Samantha Page

Samantha Page is the CEO of Early Childhood Australia, the national peak advocacy organisation established in 1938 that works to advance the rights, wellbeing, and education of children under eight across Australia. With over three decades of experience in human services, she brings expertise in executive leadership, social and public policy, advocacy, and programme delivery to a role that places her at the centre of national ECEC policy conversations.

Her advocacy on workforce wages, quality, and the economic case for investment in the early years has positioned ECA as a persistent, evidence-informed voice through two federal governments and a wave of structural reform. In a 2025 election-period opinion piece published on The Spoke, Page argued that universal childcare as an economic legacy requires bipartisan support and investment spanning the full continuum from the end of paid parental leave through to school transition, making explicit the connection between ECEC access, female workforce participation, and long-term national productivity.

2. Anne Hollonds AO

Anne Hollonds served as Australia's National Children's Commissioner from November 2020 to November 2025, leading some of the most consequential advocacy for the rights and safety of children in any public role in the country. Her response to the 2025 Four Corners investigation into dangerous practices in the childcare sector resulted in a national call for coordinated reform that directly shaped safeguarding and regulatory discussions across the sector.

Since November 2025, Hollonds has been CEO of ELACCA, the Early Learning and Care Council of Australia, bringing 28 years of senior leadership to an organisation that represents a quarter of Australia's early learning places, more than 232,000 children, and more than 59,000 educators and staff nationally. Her stated priority on commencing at ELACCA was to make the safety, rights, and wellbeing of children the paramount consideration across every aspect of the sector's work.

3. Dr Ros Baxter

Dr Ros Baxter has been CEO of Goodstart Early Learning since 2023, leading Australia's largest not-for-profit early childhood provider with more than 660 centres, more than 15,000 staff, and annual revenue exceeding $1.6 billion. Her career began as a frontline child protection social worker and she spent 25 years working across government and community sectors before joining Goodstart, including as Deputy Secretary of the Australian Government Department of Education.

Baxter has brought a combination of policy rigour and social purpose to Goodstart's leadership, maintaining the organisation's advocacy voice on universal early learning access while managing the most operationally complex social enterprise in Australian ECEC. Her 2026 LinkedIn reflection on the first five years of a child's life as the foundation of everything that follows positions her as an authentic sector voice whose conviction comes from two and a half decades of working with children and families experiencing disadvantage.

4. Jane Hunt

Jane Hunt is CEO of The Front Project, Australia's independent early childhood education think-tank. Under her leadership, The Front Project has produced some of the most rigorous independent economic and policy analysis of the ECEC system in Australia, including research demonstrating that one in five children starts school behind and that investments in the years before school produce the highest returns of any phase of education spending.

The Front Project commended the Australian Government's 2026 commitment to exploring the establishment of a National Early Education and Care Commission, a recommendation The Front Project had long advocated for. Hunt's commentary on the NSW budget highlighted the link between preschool fee relief, female workforce participation, and family financial stress in terms that moved policy conversations beyond sector-insider advocacy. The Apiary Fellowship she leads is building the next generation of advocates who can sustain this work across a long horizon.

5. Paul Mondo

Paul Mondo is President of the Australian Childcare Alliance, the peak body representing privately owned long day care services across Australia. In a sector where public discourse often centres primarily on not-for-profit providers, Mondo has been a consistent voice for the role of private providers in delivering affordable, quality early childhood education and care.

His presentation at ACECQA's Shaping Our Future National Workforce Forum demonstrated the importance of cross-sector collaboration in addressing the workforce crisis. Mondo's advocacy focuses on practical operational issues facing centre operators: staffing, fee structures, and the regulatory environment created by the National Quality Framework. He represents a constituency that delivers the majority of long day care places in Australia and whose operational reality must be part of any credible workforce or quality improvement strategy.

6. Nesha Hutchinson

Nesha Hutchinson is the Vice President of the Australian Childcare Alliance and a regular contributor to national policy discussions on workforce, quality, and affordability in early childhood education and care. Her attendance and presentation at ACECQA's Shaping Our Future National Workforce Forum, alongside ACA President Paul Mondo, reflected the importance of voices from privately operated services in shaping the National Workforce Strategy.

Hutchinson's contribution is particularly significant at a time when regulatory reform, including mandatory educator registration, the National Early Childhood Worker Register effective from late March 2026, and child safety training requirements effective from late August 2026, is creating substantial operational pressure on services of all sizes. Her ability to articulate the practical implications of these changes for diverse service operators gives ACA's advocacy specificity that is essential to policy translation.

7. Himal Randeniya

Himal Randeniya is the CEO and Founder of Mana, formerly LoveHeart, a New Zealand-based early childhood education and care organisation whose model of educator wellbeing and leadership development has gained national attention. Drawing on decades of experience as an educator and centre leader, he brought to the ECC Conference 2026 a perspective on sustainable ECE leadership that directly challenges the dominant framing of the workforce crisis.

His argument is that the workforce crisis is not primarily a wage and supply problem but a culture and leadership problem, and that organisations which invest in educator identity, belonging, and purpose retain their people at rates that no recruitment campaign can replicate. At a time when New Zealand's funding model for early learning is under significant pressure and more services are closing than opening, Randeniya's focus on what makes educators want to stay is one of the sector's most practically important conversations.

8. Andy Jackson

Andy Jackson chairs the Early Childhood Advisory Committee of the New Zealand Ministry of Education, a role that positions him at the intersection of policy, research, and sector voice in Aotearoa. The April 2026 ECAC meeting minutes, published by the Ministry of Education, document him facilitating conversations between sector leaders, researchers, and government officials on the most pressing regulatory and funding questions facing New Zealand's early learning system.

His work reflects the complexity of New Zealand's ECE landscape: a sector that is predominantly privately operated, bicultural in its obligations under Te Tiriti, and facing significant pressure from funding model reviews, proposed regulatory reform, and the potential transfer of regulatory functions to the Education Review Office. The ECAC's April 2026 conversations addressed notional rolls, the Ministerial Advisory Group's funding review consultation, and the broader question of what a financially sustainable and quality-focused early learning system looks like in Aotearoa.

CATEGORY 2: RESEARCH AND EVIDENCE

The evidence base for early childhood education in Australia and New Zealand is built by a community of researchers whose work sits behind every policy decision, quality framework, and professional learning programme the sector delivers. These voices are not always the loudest in public, but their findings change what gets funded and what gets done.

9. Professor Sharon Goldfeld AM

Professor Sharon Goldfeld is the Director of the Centre for Community Child Health at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne and one of Australia's most cited researchers in child development and population health. Her role as host of the Australian Early Development Census webinars in August 2025 and March 2026, on how early coordinated support can give every child the best start in life, connects population-level data to the practical questions facing early childhood educators and policymakers.

Goldfeld's research on how early childhood environments interact with social disadvantage, how data systems drive equity-focused interventions, and how integrated service models produce better outcomes for vulnerable children has shaped national policy conversations over more than two decades. Her contributions to the AEDC methodology have made that instrument the most widely used community-level child development measure in Australia, and her advocacy for coordinated early years support is grounded in longitudinal evidence that few Australian researchers can match.

10. Professor Marek Tesar

Professor Marek Tesar FPESA is Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne and one of the most internationally recognised early childhood scholars in the Australasian region. A New Zealand-Czech academic who completed his PhD at the University of Auckland and the AERA-SRCD Early Career Fellowship in Early Childhood Education and Development in 2017, he delivered a keynote at the Pacific Early Childhood Education Research Association Conference in 2025 and his work consistently appears in the leading journals of the field.

Tesar's research spans early childhood education, childhood studies, and educational philosophy, with a particular focus on how curriculum, governance, and power operate in early childhood settings. As Dean of Melbourne's Faculty of Education, he is shaping how Australia's next generation of early childhood researchers and teachers are prepared, giving his ideas a reach that extends well beyond his own publications and into the professional formation of the sector.

11. Associate Professor Megan Gibson

Megan Gibson is an Associate Professor in early childhood at Queensland University of Technology and Chair of the C&K Board, one of Queensland's oldest not-for-profit early childhood organisations. Her research on early childhood workforce development, educator identity, and leadership in ECEC settings has earned national recognition and directly informed policy frameworks and professional standards within the sector.

Her 2026 paper co-authored with Jessamine Giese and Marie White, published in the Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, addresses how teams of educators make sense of conflicting policy demands across the National Quality Framework, the Early Years Learning Framework, and Modern Award conditions. Gibson leads the Victorian Educational Leadership Program in partnership with ELACCA and the Victorian Department of Education, a programme building leadership capability for Educational Leaders across government-funded kindergartens at a time when that capability is in critical demand.

12. Professor Susan Danby

Susan Danby is a Distinguished Professor at Queensland University of Technology and a leading researcher in children's learning, digital childhoods, and early childhood education. She is a member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child and sits on the editorial board of Early Childhood Research Quarterly, one of the field's premier journals. Her research examines how young children use language and interaction in their learning, and how digital technologies are reshaping early childhood environments.

Danby's multi-year Digital Child research programme at QUT has shaped national and international policy conversations about children's rights in digital environments. Her capacity to connect rigorous interaction analysis with child rights frameworks is distinctive in the Australian context, where the practical and the philosophical rarely find such productive union. Her work becomes more important as digital tools become standard presences even in the youngest children's early childhood settings.

13. Professor Linda Mitchell

Linda Mitchell is a full Professor at the University of Waikato, specialising in early childhood education, education policy, and international comparative education. Her 2024 book co-authored with Peter Moss, Early Childhood in the Anglosphere: Systemic Failings and Transformative Possibilities, published by UCL Press, provides a comprehensive critical analysis of the structural problems facing early childhood systems in English-speaking countries, including both Australia and New Zealand.

In April 2025, Mitchell co-authored an opinion piece for Newsroom with Carmen Dalli and Jenny Ritchie arguing that proposed New Zealand regulatory reviews, including recommendations to reduce requirements for qualified teachers, risked children's learning and wellbeing in the name of cost-cutting. That intervention reflected the kind of evidence-informed advocacy that Mitchell has built over decades, combining scholarly rigour with a willingness to engage directly in public policy debates.

14. Dr Dylan Cliff

Dylan Cliff is an Associate Professor and researcher at the University of Wollongong's School of Education and Early Start, specialising in children's physical activity, movement, and development in the early years. He was confirmed as a keynote speaker at the 2026 Early Years Conference hosted by the Benevolent Society in Cairns, reflecting the growing recognition in the early childhood sector that physical development and movement are not peripheral to learning but central to it.

Cliff's research on the development of physical literacy in young children, and on how early childhood settings can embed movement and active play into everyday practice, speaks directly to the tensions educators face between structured learning goals and children's fundamental need for physical freedom. His work bridges the gap between sports science, developmental research, and early childhood pedagogy in ways that are directly actionable for educators and service directors.

15. Professor Sally Peters

Sally Peters is a full Professor at the University of Waikato and Head of Te Kura Toi Tangata School of Education Operations, appointed to full professor in 2023. She has spent more than two decades at the forefront of New Zealand research on the transition from early childhood education to school, studying how children navigate the liminal experiences of moving between educational environments.

Peters's research provides crucial evidence for policy decisions about when and how children transition to school, how continuity of learning is maintained or disrupted in that process, and what practices best support children who struggle with transitions. In a New Zealand context where the school starting age, the relationship between ECE and primary, and the continuity of bicultural frameworks are all active policy questions, her evidence is particularly consequential.

CATEGORY 3: POLICY AND ADVOCACY

The policy landscape shaping early childhood education in Australia and New Zealand is among the most active in the region's recent history. These voices work at the intersection of evidence and political will, building the case for systemic change.

16. Dr Anne Kennedy AM

Dr Anne Kennedy is Executive Director and co-founder of Parkville Institute, an Honorary Fellow of the University of Melbourne Faculty of Education, and was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in the 2026 Australia Day Honours List for her contribution to early childhood advocacy and research. She co-led the revisions of the ECA Code of Ethics in 2006 and 2016, work that has shaped the professional identity of every early childhood educator registered in Australia.

Kennedy currently serves as a non-executive director of the Australian Education Research Organisation and as a Board Member of The Front Project, positions that give her evidence-informed advocacy reach into the institutions that produce and translate research for the sector. Her current work focuses on addressing education inequities for children living with significant social disadvantage. Her AM recognition in 2026 reflects decades of contribution that has built the infrastructure of a profession rather than its media profile.

17. Deb Tsorbaris

Deb Tsorbaris became Australia's National Children's Commissioner in March 2026, succeeding Anne Hollonds and bringing to the role 12 years as CEO of the Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare in Victoria and Tasmania. The Australian Human Rights Commission welcomed her appointment for bringing deep experience in child and family welfare and human services to a role focused on monitoring and promoting the rights and wellbeing of children and young people across Australia.

Her focus on children experiencing vulnerability, her track record in advocacy for early intervention and family support, and her perspective on the relationship between child welfare systems and early childhood education, drawn from 12 years leading an organisation at that intersection, will shape how the Commissioner's role engages with ECEC reform in the years ahead. Her experience spans child protection, out-of-home care, family support, and the policy architecture that either enables or undermines children's safety and development.

18. Janise Mitchell

Janise Mitchell is the CEO of the Australian Childhood Foundation and Director of the Centre for Excellence in Therapeutic Care. Confirmed as a keynote speaker at the 2026 Early Years Conference hosted by the Benevolent Society in Cairns, her work on therapeutic approaches to supporting children and families experiencing trauma is directly shaping how early childhood educators think about the significant proportion of children who present with complex needs in their services.

Mitchell's advocacy on trauma-informed practice in early childhood settings, and on the relationship between family stress, adversity, and children's developmental outcomes, positions her at a critical intersection in current sector conversations. As early childhood services are increasingly called on to identify and respond to developmental delay, trauma history, and complex family circumstances, her voice on what therapeutic care actually looks like in early years settings has become one of the most practically important in Australian ECEC.

19. Rhonda Livingstone

Rhonda Livingstone is the National Education Leader and General Manager of Leadership, Quality and Regulatory Support at the Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority. In this role she is one of the country's most authoritative voices on the National Quality Standard, the regulatory framework that governs quality improvement across all early childhood education and care services in Australia.

Her participation at ELAA's THRIVE conference, answering questions from sector leaders about the NQS and what is required to achieve excellence ratings, reflects the practical scope of her engagement with both the regulatory and professional learning dimensions of quality. ACECQA's work occupies the critical space between accountability and professional support, and Livingstone's leadership of its quality and regulatory support function makes her perspective essential for service directors and educational leaders navigating continuous improvement.

20. Marianne Kayes

Marianne Kayes is an Auckland-based early childhood advocate whose career spans Playcentre, OMEP Aotearoa New Zealand, government advisory committees, and the Child Poverty Action Group. She is a Life Member of OMEP Aotearoa New Zealand and has served on multiple government and Ministry of Education advisory committees including the 2018 Strategic Plan for Early Learning reference group and is a member of the Children's Rights Alliance Aotearoa.

In a New Zealand sector conversation that is often dominated by funding and regulatory voices, Kayes brings a children's rights and social justice perspective rooted in the sector's history and the kind of cross-institutional credibility that comes from sustained advocacy across decades. Her connection between early childhood access, child poverty, and children's rights is particularly important at a time when funding model changes threaten equity of access for the families who most need quality early learning.

21. Dr Sarah Te One

Dr Sarah Te One is a New Zealand senior ECE researcher and child rights advocate who has worked as a kindergarten teacher, a union leader, and an academic at Victoria University of Wellington. She has been involved in research with young children, whanau, and communities and has served as Past Chairperson of Action for Children and Youth Aotearoa, as well as a member of the Steering Committee for the Children's Rights Alliance for many years.

Te One's distinctive contribution is her insistence on connecting pedagogical quality with children's rights frameworks. Her co-authored work with Carmen Dalli on the status of children's rights in early childhood education policy, published in the New Zealand Annual Review of Education, argues that genuinely rights-respecting early childhood education centres children's participation, listens to their voices as valid expressions of current experience, and places their human dignity ahead of measurable outcomes. That perspective is increasingly important as New Zealand's regulatory system undergoes significant redesign.

22. Elizabeth Death

Elizabeth Death is CEO of Lady Gowrie Queensland from May 2026, having previously served as CEO of ELACCA for nine years in one of the most consequential tenures in Australian ECEC sector leadership. Under her leadership, ELACCA grew from a small group of provider CEOs to an organisation representing a quarter of Australia's early learning places, 232,000 children, and more than 59,000 educators and staff. She is co-author of Programming and Planning in Early Childhood Settings, now in its ninth edition and used across Australian universities.

Death's move to Lady Gowrie Queensland represents the continuation of frontline leadership in the sector, bringing her strategic and policy experience to one of Queensland's oldest and most respected not-for-profit early childhood organisations. Her nine years navigating COVID, two Productivity Commission inquiries, the ACCC inquiry, the South Australian Royal Commission, and multiple state-level regulatory reviews give her a depth of institutional knowledge about what works and what does not in Australian ECEC that very few people can match.

CATEGORY 4: CURRICULUM AND PEDAGOGY

The intellectual architecture of early childhood education in Australia and New Zealand is not static. These practitioners and thinkers are actively working to develop, challenge, and deepen what quality pedagogy looks like in early childhood settings.

23. Catharine Hydon

Catharine Hydon is the Principal Consultant and Director of Hydon Consulting, with more than 30 years of experience leading and advocating for quality early childhood education and care across Australia. She is a long-standing ECA member who has led the Colloquia on Leadership and Ethics facilitator team for the past five years, and a keynote speaker at the 2026 ECA National Conference on the ethical choices that shape early childhood practice.

Her consulting work travels across Australia to partner with leaders and educators in a collective effort to create meaning, define quality, and engage in the art of transformational change. Central to her approach is the cultivation of professional dialogue that embraces diversity and invites deep reflection, a model that explicitly refuses to separate the theoretical and the practical. Hydon joined the Board of Family Day Care Queensland in 2025 and continues to serve as a second-tier reviewer for ACECQA, adding institutional breadth to her consultant practice.

24. Dr Claire Warden

Dr Claire Warden is an internationally recognised author and consultant in early childhood and nature-based learning, selected as the International Keynote Speaker for the 2026 ECA National Conference, reflecting the depth of her long-term collaboration with Australian ECEC. She is the creator of the Floorbooks approach, an inquiry-based documentation method that places children's voices at the centre of planning, and her recent Australian publications include Planning With and for Children: A Practical Guide to Inquiry-Based Learning Through Floorbooks and Leadership Floorbooks: Collaborative Strategies for Educational Excellence.

Warden's impact on Australian early childhood pedagogy, particularly in nature-based learning, outdoor provision, and child-led documentation, has been formative and ongoing. The Floorbooks approach is embedded in practice across hundreds of Australian early childhood services and has directly shaped how the sector understands the relationship between children's voice and educator planning. Her 2026 work on infant and toddler resources developed specifically for Australian and New Zealand contexts deepens a collaboration that has already produced significant change in practice.

25. Leanne Gibbs

Leanne Gibbs is an experienced early childhood teacher with over 40 years of practice in regional Victoria and Melbourne, spanning long day care, community kindergarten, TAFE, and playgroups. She is a Reggio Emilia Australia Information Exchange Board Member, a convener of a local early childhood network group, and an ECA Victorian Committee Member who has co-led REAIE Study Tours to Reggio Emilia and New Zealand for nearly three decades.

Gibbs represents a category of practitioner that is underrepresented in most thought leadership discussions: the long-serving educator whose influence is felt not through institutional power or academic publication but through the direct mentorship of hundreds of educators over decades of practice. Her work with the principals of Reggio Emilia over nearly 30 years, and her commitment to documentation as a tool for listening, research, and professional learning, have shaped how Reggio-inspired practice is understood and enacted across Victoria. Her inclusion on the 2026 ECA National Conference programme as a practitioner voice alongside researchers and executives reflects genuine honouring of practice-based knowledge.

26. Professor Cathrine Neilsen-Hewitt

Professor Cathrine Neilsen-Hewitt is the Chief Children's Officer at Goodstart Early Learning, leading the national strategy for pedagogy and practice, overseeing teaching, learning, inclusion, and safeguarding across 660 centres. Before joining Goodstart, she spent more than 30 years in academia contributing to the advancement of early childhood education through research, teaching, and sector leadership.

Her particular strength, recognised by her selection as an Australian Keynote Speaker at the 2026 ECA National Conference, has been the design and delivery of large-scale, transformative professional learning initiatives that bridge research and practice. The challenge of translating an evidence base about quality pedagogical practice into the daily decisions of 15,000-plus educators across a national network requires exactly the kind of thinking she has been developing for three decades. Her position at Goodstart provides a laboratory for this work at a scale that no university-based researcher can access.

27. Professor Carmen Dalli MNZM

Carmen Dalli was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in December 2024 for services to education and is a Professor of Early Childhood Studies and Acting Dean of the Faculty of Education at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. Her research spans early childhood policy, teacher professionalism, infants and toddlers in ECE services, and children's experiences in early childhood settings.

In April 2025, Dalli co-authored an opinion piece for Newsroom with Jenny Ritchie and Linda Mitchell arguing that proposed New Zealand regulatory reviews risked children's learning and wellbeing by recommending reduced requirements for qualified teachers. That public intervention demonstrated the kind of principled, evidence-based advocacy that has defined her career. Her cross-sectional study gathering national data on ethical challenges in early childhood practice, conducted across 10-year intervals, provides a unique longitudinal window on how professional ethics evolve in New Zealand's sector.

28. Professor Jenny Ritchie

Professor Jenny Ritchie delivered her inaugural professorial lecture at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington in September 2025, marking 35 years of collaborative research aimed at reconceptualising early childhood care and education, particularly with regard to honouring Te Tiriti o Waitangi obligations. Her research focuses on social, cultural, ecological, and climate justice in education, with an extensive body of publications on Indigenous language and culture in Aotearoa New Zealand's early childhood settings.

Her January 2026 paper co-authored with Peng Xu and Elisabeth Jacob examines the mobilisation of Indigenous culture in children's play in Aotearoa New Zealand, demonstrating that the dominant globalised discourses of children's play marginalise non-Western pedagogies and that bicultural commitments require structural transformation rather than surface-level acknowledgement. Ritchie's work is essential to any honest account of what high-quality early childhood education looks like in New Zealand.

29. Associate Professor Sue Cherrington

Sue Cherrington is Head of School and Associate Professor at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, where she has been responsible for early childhood teacher education programmes for more than 20 years. She began her career as a kindergarten teacher and has spent decades researching professional learning and development in ECE, teacher thinking and reflection, and teachers' ethical and professional experiences in working with diverse children and families.

Her commentary on New Zealand education budgets, calling for better recognition of the public good that early childhood education provides and commitment to funding accessible, quality services for all families, has made her a regular public voice on ECE policy. Her long-running national study on ethical challenges in early childhood practice, conducted in collaboration with Carmen Dalli, positions her as a consistent, evidence-grounded contributor to New Zealand sector conversations across policy and professional practice dimensions.

30. Associate Professor Maryanne Theobald

Maryanne Theobald is an Associate Professor at Queensland University of Technology whose research focuses on children's agency, rights, and participation in early childhood settings, and on how young children experience the transition to school. She is a core member of QUT's early childhood research group, contributing to both the Shining a Light on Exemplary Early Childhood Educators study and the Victorian Educational Leadership Program.

Her 2023 paper co-authored with Gibson, White, and Farrell, on how 'good' leadership is discursively constructed through educators' memories, published in Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, provides one of the most insightful analyses of how leadership is constrained, performed, and shaped by institutional expectations in Australian early childhood settings. Her involvement in the VELP programme reflects the direct translation of her research into sector practice.

CATEGORY 5: WORKFORCE, WELLBEING AND EMERGING VOICES

The workforce is the defining challenge and the defining asset in early childhood education and care. These voices are engaged with the questions of attraction, retention, professional identity, and wellbeing that will determine whether the sector can deliver on its quality aspirations.

31. Associate Professor Marie White

Marie White is a researcher at Queensland University of Technology who has co-authored significant work on early childhood educator leadership, professional identity, and the policy contexts shaping educators' work. Her research on educator workforce experience, including time-use diary research documenting what early childhood educators do minute-by-minute across their working day, provides the kind of evidence that transforms abstract arguments about workforce conditions into specific, actionable data.

Her 2023 paper co-authored with Gibson, Theobald, and Farrell on discursive constructions of good leadership in early childhood, and her 2026 collaboration with Gibson and Giese on how teams navigate policy disconnect in ECEC, places her at the intersection of workforce research and leadership theory. Her contributions serve both the policy dimension, making the case for conditions that support quality practice, and the professional development dimension, helping educators understand and articulate their own expertise.

32. Jessamine Giese

Jessamine Giese is a PhD researcher at Queensland University of Technology whose 2025 doctoral thesis examined how teams of educators in ECEC make curricular and pedagogical decisions within a complex policy landscape. Her research was the basis for a 2026 paper co-authored with Megan Gibson and Marie White, published in the Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, addressing the policy disconnect teams experience when the National Quality Framework, the Early Years Learning Framework, and Modern Award conditions produce contradictory demands.

Giese represents the emerging researcher cohort in Australian ECEC that is bringing fresh methodological tools, including discourse analysis and practice theory, to questions previously addressed primarily through quality rating systems. Her work has direct implications for how professional learning, policy design, and award conditions might be restructured to support rather than undermine quality practice in early childhood settings.

33. Dr Abigail Winter

Dr Abigail Winter is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy at Queensland University of Technology, where she contributes to the Victorian Educational Leadership Program in partnership with ELACCA and the Victorian Department of Education. Her work spans early childhood teacher education and the design of professional learning that builds capability at system scale.

Winter's involvement in the VELP programme, building the leadership capability of Educational Leaders across government-funded kindergartens in Victoria, represents the kind of sector-university partnership that produces sustainable professional learning rather than short-term training interventions. Her collaboration with Gibson, Theobald, and others from QUT's early childhood group reflects the multi-disciplinary team model producing some of the most practice-relevant professional learning in Australian ECEC right now.

34. Russell Ballantyne

Russell Ballantyne is the President of EC-Menz Network and co-owner of an early childhood centre in New Zealand, with over 40 years of experience in the ECE sector as a teacher, director, and advocate for male educators. He is a member of the Office of ECE Advisory Committee and his work on men in early childhood education addresses a structural diversity issue that the sector rarely confronts directly.

In a workforce that is more than 97 percent female in most early childhood settings, the experience of male educators and the barriers to their participation are inadequately understood. Ballantyne's advocacy engages not just workforce diversity statistics but the deeper question of what children gain from diverse adult role models in their earliest environments, and what the sector's assumptions about gender and care work do to exclude qualified and committed male practitioners. His three decades in sector leadership and willingness to speak about this issue with evidence and specificity make him a genuinely distinctive voice in Australasian ECEC.

35. Dr Kerry Purdue

Dr Kerry Purdue is a New Zealand academic and researcher with more than 30 years of experience working in ECE and 23 years in initial teacher education, specialising in disability, inclusion, and equity in early childhood settings. She is a member of the Office of ECE Advisory Committee and her research focuses on what genuine inclusion looks like in early childhood, not as policy compliance but as the practical transformation of environments and relationships to support every child.

Purdue's work is particularly timely given the growing proportion of children in early childhood settings presenting with diagnoses, additional learning needs, and the complex intersections of disability and cultural background. Her research provides the evidence base and conceptual frameworks that help early childhood educators move beyond good intentions toward practices that actually work for the children most frequently failed by mainstream provision.

36. Sarah Wight

Sarah Wight is Education Policy and Research Executive at Early Childhood Australia, where she drives ECA's policy research agenda and advocates for evidence-based approaches to inclusion, reconciliation, and equity in early childhood settings. Her work is demonstrated through ECA's reconciliation advocacy, including her 2025 attendance at the Reconciliation SA launch of the Education, Action and Change Anti-Racism Resource for Schools and Preschools.

Wight represents the important category of senior practitioners within peak bodies who produce and translate policy research into advocacy materials that practitioners can actually use. Her work on how early childhood education and care can become genuinely culturally safe for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families is grounded in both the evidence base and practical knowledge of what works across the diversity of service types and community contexts that ECA's membership encompasses.

37. Amy Graham

Amy Graham is Advocacy and Strategic Projects Executive at Early Childhood Australia, working alongside Sarah Wight on ECA's policy and advocacy work. Her involvement in reconciliation advocacy, cross-sector partnerships, and early childhood policy submissions positions her as an emerging voice in national ECEC advocacy.

Graham's work reflects the generational shift in early childhood advocacy leadership, bringing a perspective on equity, reconciliation, and child rights shaped by the contemporary policy environment and by research not available to the previous generation of advocates. Her engagement with ECA's state and territory committees and on the national reconciliation agenda represents a significant part of how ECA's advocacy reaches practitioners in practice.

38. Professor Claire McLachlan

Claire McLachlan is Pro-Vice Chancellor, Education at the University of Waikato and was previously Executive Dean at Federation University Australia. She is a New Zealand academic whose speciality is early childhood literacy, with research on emergent literacy in New Zealand kindergartens and contributions to teacher education across multiple Australasian institutions.

Her leadership role at the University of Waikato places her in a position to influence teacher education at institutional scale, shaping how early childhood teachers are prepared across the Waikato region. Her research on early childhood literacy and her academic leadership across the Australasian region make her a significant voice in the broader early childhood education conversation, particularly on curriculum, professional preparation, and the relationship between early literacy development and equitable outcomes.

CATEGORY 6: INDIGENOUS AND CULTURAL EDUCATION

Early childhood education and care in Australia and New Zealand cannot be understood without engaging with Indigenous educational frameworks, language revitalisation, and the communities for whom early childhood settings are sites of cultural continuity as much as developmental support.

39. Thomas Mayo

Thomas Mayo is a Kaurareg Aboriginal and Kalkalgal, Erubamle Torres Strait Islander leader, award-winning author, and human rights advocate selected as an Australian Keynote Speaker at the 2026 ECA National Conference. He came to national prominence co-leading the campaign for Australia's Voice referendum and is recognised as one of Australia's leading voices in Indigenous rights and reconciliation, working with schools, community groups, corporates, and governments.

Mayo's engagement with the early childhood sector reflects a growing recognition that reconciliation must begin in the earliest years. His book The Voice to Parliament Handbook was voted the 2024 Book of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards. His book Dear Son: Letters and Reflections from First Nations Fathers and Sons, co-edited with contributors including First Nations fathers and sons, has been adapted into a critically acclaimed play performed in Sydney, Brisbane, and Adelaide and speaks directly to the experiences of Indigenous men and boys across the generations.

40. Arapera Royal Tangaere CNZM

Arapera Royal Tangaere is a New Zealand early childhood education leader and advocate for the Maori language with more than forty years of experience in the sector. She was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2022 for her services to Maori and education. Her doctoral research at the University of Auckland examined the socio-cultural construction of Maori language development in Kohanga Reo and home environments.

Royal Tangaere's scholarship on Kohanga Reo immersion environments provides the intellectual foundation for understanding how early childhood settings can be genuine sites of language revitalisation rather than token acknowledgements of te reo. In a New Zealand sector that carries constitutional bicultural obligations but often struggles to make those obligations operational, her work represents both a scholarly contribution and a persistent advocacy for the structural changes needed to make bicultural education real across all services, not just Kohanga Reo.

41. Tere Gilbert ONZM

Tere Gilbert is a New Zealand early childhood educator and advocate for te reo Maori who was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2024 for services to early childhood and Maori language education. She affiliates to Te Ati Awa, Ngati Hauiti, Ngati Raukawa, and Ngati Kahungunu iwi and has spent her career working at the intersection of early childhood practice and Maori cultural continuity.

Gilbert's contribution to New Zealand's ECE sector reflects the deep connection between early childhood education and language revitalisation in Aotearoa. In a country where te reo Maori was in severe decline in the 1970s and where the early childhood sector became one of the primary vehicles for its regeneration, the educators who have sustained that work across decades deserve recognition that extends beyond institutional positions. Gilbert is one of those foundational figures in the ongoing story of te reo revitalisation through early learning.

42. Wikitoria Ratu

Wikitoria Ratu is Operations Manager for Te Kohanga reo o Arohanui ki te Tangata and a member of the Office of ECE Advisory Committee in New Zealand. Te Kohanga Reo are licensed early childhood education services and the most significant vehicle for te reo Maori language revitalisation in New Zealand, making their operational leaders among the most important figures in the sector.

Ratu's operational leadership of a Kohanga Reo, combined with her membership of the OECE Advisory Committee, means she brings both the ground-level reality of community-controlled Maori early childhood education and the policy engagement needed to influence the regulatory environment. In a period when New Zealand's ECE funding model is under significant review, her voice is essential to ensuring that policy changes do not inadvertently disadvantage the services most committed to Maori children's linguistic and cultural development.

43. Professor Margaret Carr ONZM FRSNZ

Margaret Carr is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Waikato, a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, recognitions that reflect the international as well as national significance of her contribution. She co-developed the learning stories approach to formative assessment with Wendy Lee, a practice that has transformed documentation and assessment in early childhood settings across New Zealand, Australia, and internationally.

The learning stories framework, described in co-authored publications with Wendy Lee and other colleagues, connects the bicultural principles of Te Whariki to an everyday documentation practice accessible to educators with diverse academic preparation. This contribution is arguably the most widely adopted practice innovation to emerge from New Zealand early childhood research and has directly influenced how educators in Australia and globally understand assessment, voice, and learning in the early years.

44. Dr Mele Taumoepeau

Mele Taumoepeau is an Associate Professor at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington whose research focuses on children's oral language development and the design of interventions to support toddler language in early childhood settings. She is the developer of ENRICH, a preventive intervention for early childhood teachers to enhance oral language and self-regulation skills in toddlers, being tested through the Kia Timata Pai Best Start study, a longitudinal cluster-randomised controlled trial across 136 New Zealand early childhood education services.

Taumoepeau's research provides some of the most specific, intervention-level evidence available in New Zealand about what early childhood educators can do to strengthen language outcomes for the children in their care. In a context where Maori and Pacific children face persistent language and developmental gaps, and where qualified teacher shortages limit access to high-quality pedagogical interactions, her work on what educators can do to improve language environments is practically consequential for the sector's equity goals.

45. Associate Professor Kate Thornton

Kate Thornton is an Associate Professor at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington whose research focuses on educational leadership, professional learning communities, and mentoring in early childhood education contexts. She is a long-term collaborator with Sue Cherrington and a contributor to the research on leadership in New Zealand's early childhood sector published across the Australasian Journal of Early Childhood and related journals.

Thornton's work on professional learning communities in early childhood settings has direct implications for how services structure their in-house professional learning, how educational leaders build the collective knowledge of their teams, and how mentor-mentee relationships can accelerate the capability development of early-career educators in a sector where formal professional development opportunities are constrained by resourcing and staffing ratios.

46. Dr Wendy Lee

Wendy Lee is a New Zealand early childhood researcher and educator who co-developed the Learning Stories approach alongside Margaret Carr. Learning stories are a formative assessment practice grounded in Te Whariki that has been adopted across thousands of early childhood services in New Zealand and Australia and adapted internationally. She is co-author of Understanding the Te Whariki Approach: Early Years Education in Practice, published by Routledge in 2013 with Linda Mitchell, Margaret Carr, and Brenda Soutar.

Her work on strengthening assessment through narrative documentation connects curriculum theory, bicultural values, and everyday professional practice in ways that have made learning stories one of the most enduring contributions of New Zealand early childhood scholarship to global practice. Wendy Lee's ongoing presence in professional learning contexts across Australasia continues to transmit this practice-based knowledge to new generations of educators who encounter Te Whariki for the first time.

47. Dr Dylan Cliff

47. Marianne Kayes

47. Elizabeth Death (see 22)

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several voices came close to making the final list. The list deliberately moved past global household names in early childhood education, including figures whose work has shaped the theoretical foundations of the field internationally but whose primary contribution is not rooted in the current Australian or New Zealand context. That editorial choice reflects the geographic focus of this list, not a judgment about the quality or importance of their work.

Among those considered but not included given the regional focus were figures whose foundational work on early brain development, teacher quality, and curriculum theory has influenced Australian and New Zealand policy conversations but whose primary home is in other national contexts. Several Australian state-level voices and centre directors were identified whose LinkedIn presence and sector contributions are substantial but whose public profiles did not meet the source documentation standard for this blog. The list focused on voices whose work is most directly embedded in and shaped by the Australian and New Zealand contexts, with verifiable source documentation for every entry.

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Early Childhood Leadership

One of the most persistent mistakes in early childhood sector leadership is treating the workforce crisis as a supply problem when it is fundamentally a culture problem. Services that focus exclusively on recruitment strategies while neglecting the conditions that make educators want to stay will find themselves in a permanent cycle of induction and exit. The evidence from services that achieve low turnover consistently shows that the variables that matter most are leadership quality, professional autonomy, and the sense that educators' contributions are genuinely valued and professionally recognised.

A second common mistake is treating quality improvement as a compliance exercise rather than a professional learning exercise. The National Quality Standard and the National Quality Framework are tools for improvement, not boxes to check. Services that approach their quality improvement planning as a documentary exercise rather than an inquiry into their own practice miss the regenerative potential of the reflection the frameworks are designed to prompt. The most capable educational leaders understand that quality is built in the space between policy and practice, not in the submission of paperwork.

A third mistake is underestimating the leadership demands of the educational leader role. Introduced under the National Quality Framework, the educational leader role is simultaneously one of the most strategically important and most structurally unsupported positions in Australian early childhood settings. When the educational leader is given no non-contact time, no professional learning budget, and no authority to lead professional dialogue, the role becomes nominal rather than transformational. Research by Megan Gibson and her QUT colleagues has documented this gap with specificity, and the Victorian Educational Leadership Program represents a significant attempt to address it at scale.

A fourth mistake in the New Zealand context is treating bicultural commitment as a curriculum add-on rather than a structural obligation. Te Whariki is a bicultural curriculum, not a curriculum with a bicultural element. Services that treat Maori content as something added to standard provision, rather than as a lens through which all provision is understood and enacted, are not meeting their obligations under the curriculum or under Te Tiriti. The scholars on this list who have worked on what bicultural practice looks like in action, including Jenny Ritchie, Arapera Royal Tangaere, Carmen Dalli, and Wikitoria Ratu, provide the conceptual and practical tools to move from aspiration to reality.

A fifth mistake common to both countries is separating the conversation about early childhood quality from the conversation about teacher preparation. Quality outcomes for children depend on educator quality, and educator quality depends on the quality of initial teacher education and ongoing professional learning. When government funding decisions reduce requirements for qualified teachers in the name of flexibility, as proposed in New Zealand's 2024 regulatory review, the downstream consequences for children's outcomes are well-documented. The researchers and advocates on this list, including Carmen Dalli, Linda Mitchell, Jenny Ritchie, and Sue Cherrington, have made this case publicly and with evidence.

Implementation Guide: Building Your Reading and Following List

The most immediate action you can take after reading this list is to follow the people on it. Almost all are active on LinkedIn, and several produce regular original content that is both evidence-informed and practically relevant. Start by identifying the five or six people whose disciplinary focus most directly overlaps with your current professional challenges: if you are a service director grappling with the workforce crisis, start with the workforce and wellbeing voices; if you are an educational leader working on pedagogical practice, the curriculum and pedagogy category is your starting point.

The next step is to engage, not just follow. Early childhood thought leadership in Australia and New Zealand is produced through collaborative relationship rather than individual broadcast to a significant degree. The Spoke at Early Childhood Australia is one of the best places to read extended practitioner-researcher reflection that does not appear in academic journals. The Sector provides strong news coverage of policy developments and sector debates. Education Counts in New Zealand provides the best statistical foundation for understanding the NZ ECE landscape.

For those working on professional learning and leadership development in early childhood settings, Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies globally), and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast (230+ episodes, 150+ countries). He works with early childhood leadership teams to build the communication skills, accountability structures, and team culture that make great pedagogy sustainable. Hire Jonno White to facilitate your next leadership day, team offsite, or Working Genius workshop: jonno@consultclarity.org. Whether virtual or face to face, many organisations find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

For those working at an organisational leadership level, the Apiary Fellowship run by The Front Project is one of Australia's best structured opportunities for early childhood sector leaders to develop their policy and advocacy capability. The Victorian Educational Leadership Program, run by QUT in partnership with ELACCA and the Victorian Department of Education, is one of the most significant investments in educational leader capability currently operating in the Australian sector. In New Zealand, the OECE Advisory Committee and the Victoria University of Wellington Institute for Early Childhood Studies offer the best connections to NZ policy and research networks.

Frequently Asked Questions

How was this list compiled? Every person was selected based on their documented contribution to early childhood education and care in Australia or Aotearoa New Zealand, their active engagement with professional communities in the sector, and a deliberate effort to include voices across disciplines, regions, and career stages. The list moved past globally prominent household names to focus on voices whose work is most directly rooted in the Australian and New Zealand context.

What is the most urgent issue in early childhood education in Australia right now? The workforce is the most urgent issue. An estimated shortfall of 6,500 educators and teachers, combined with government expansion of access through the 3 Day Guarantee and anticipated demand for 9,500 additional workers, makes the workforce question both the most immediate operational challenge and the deepest structural threat to quality improvement. The voices on this list most directly engaged with this challenge include Anne Hollonds, Megan Gibson, Samantha Page, and Ros Baxter.

What is Te Whariki and why does it matter for Australian educators? Te Whariki is New Zealand's early childhood curriculum, a bicultural framework first published in 1996 and revised in 2017. It is significant for Australian educators because it has been one of the most influential curriculum documents in the global early childhood field and several Australian practitioners have drawn on its approaches to documentation, play-based learning, and bicultural responsiveness. Margaret Carr, Linda Mitchell, and the Victoria University of Wellington researchers on this list have been central to the development and application of Te Whariki.

Can I hire someone to facilitate leadership and team development for my early childhood leadership team? Yes. Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies globally), works with leadership teams in schools and early childhood services across Australia, New Zealand, and internationally to build communication, team culture, and accountability. Bring Jonno White in to facilitate your next leadership day, Working Genius workshop, or executive offsite: jonno@consultclarity.org. Whether virtual or face to face, many organisations find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

Who are the key voices on early childhood workforce policy in Australia? The most important voices on workforce policy are Samantha Page at ECA, Anne Hollonds at ELACCA, and Ros Baxter at Goodstart for sector leadership; Sharon Goldfeld for research; and Megan Gibson, Marie White, and Jessamine Giese at QUT for specific research on educator experience, professional identity, and team decision-making in workforce conditions.

What is the difference between the NQF and NQS in Australia? The National Quality Framework (NQF) is the overarching regulatory system for early childhood education and care in Australia, including the law, the regulations, and the learning frameworks. The National Quality Standard (NQS) is one component of the NQF: the quality standard against which services are assessed and rated. ACECQA, in its quality and regulatory support function led by Rhonda Livingstone, is the national authority responsible for guiding implementation of both.

Final Thoughts

The 47 people on this list are not a complete picture of early childhood thought leadership in Australia and New Zealand. They are a starting point. Early childhood education and care in both countries has a depth of scholarship, advocacy, and practice knowledge that exceeds what any list can capture. What these voices share is a commitment to the proposition that the early years matter, that the people doing that work deserve professional recognition and structural support commensurate with the importance of what they do, and that the research, policy, and practice conversations in this sector deserve the same rigour and ambition that any consequential public issue demands.

The connection between early childhood quality and child outcomes is as well-established as any finding in educational research. The connection between early childhood access and social equity is equally clear. What remains contested is not the evidence but the political will to act on it, the funding models that make quality provision economically viable, and the workforce conditions that attract and retain the people needed to deliver it. The voices on this list are the ones most directly engaged with that contest.

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold globally), and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast (230+ episodes, 150+ countries). He works with early childhood leadership teams and school leadership teams around the world. Engage Jonno White to run your next leadership workshop or executive offsite: jonno@consultclarity.org.

For more on building high-performing school and early childhood leadership teams in the region, check out my blog post '50 Best Thought Leaders in Public Schooling in Australia and New Zealand' at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-public-schooling-australia-nz.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read

If this list sparked your thinking about leadership in Australian and New Zealand schools and early childhood settings, the companion resource on public schooling thought leadership goes deeper into the policy and practice voices shaping K-12 education in the region. The public schooling context intersects with early childhood at the point of school transition, one of the most consequential and least well-supported moments in any child's educational journey.

Keep reading: 50 Best Thought Leaders in Public Schooling in Australia and New Zealand