50 Early Childhood Thought Leaders and How to Engage with Their Ideas
Photo by Compagnons
A list of 50 Essential Early Childhood Thought Leaders in Canada was released in June, along with an implementation guide for taking action on this list, by an Australian consultancy group that has been following recent ECE policy and practice developments in Canada.
Jonno White, an Australian-based author, podcaster and leadership consultant, has reviewed recent developments in the Canadian ECE field and has produced a list of 50 “thinkers, researchers, advocates, and practitioners who have spent their careers making the case for early childhood as a national priority. The 50 people on this list are the leaders who have genuinely shaped how Canada thinks about, delivers, researchers, funds, and advocates for its youngest citizens.”
The document commences with a review of recent developments in Canada in the field of ECE and argues for why ECE investment matters and why the list was created:
Canada's investment in early childhood education and care represents a generational bet on the long-term wellbeing of its children, its economy, and its society. The research base supporting that investment is overwhelming. High-quality early childhood education produces measurable improvements in children's educational outcomes, social development, and long-term health. It increases labour force participation, particularly for mothers.
It reduces costs associated with remediation, social services, and criminal justice across the full arc of a person's life. And it is among the most powerful levers available for breaking cycles of intergenerational poverty and disadvantage.
Canada's shift to a $10-a-day child care system is already demonstrating these effects at scale. Provinces and territories that implemented fee reductions earliest have seen measurable increases in both child care enrolment and maternal labour force participation. But access remains deeply uneven. Indigenous communities, families in rural and remote areas, children with complex needs, and newcomer families continue to face barriers that affordable fees alone cannot resolve.
The work of making early childhood education truly universal and genuinely equitable is far from complete, and the people on this list are doing the hard, sustained work of getting it there.
The early childhood sector also faces a serious workforce challenge. Canada's Job Bank estimates a strong risk of labour shortage in the ECE sector through 2033. Wages remain significantly below those of comparable educational roles in K-12 settings. Recruitment and retention have become as urgent as access and quality.
The people on this list are addressing all of these dimensions at once, from the classroom to the legislature, and from the research laboratory to the community organisation.
The list of 50 leaders and change makers is divided into categories, with an outline for each person of the nature of their contribution.
• Category 1: Policy Architects and System Builders
• Category 2: Developmental Scientists and Neuroscience-Informed Practitioners
• Category 3: Play, Outdoor Learning, and Risky Play Advocates
• Category 4: Indigenous Early Childhood and Reconciliation
• Category 5: Pedagogy, Curriculum, and Reconceptualist Approaches
• Category 6: Child Care Workforce, Quality, and System Equity
• Category 7: Family, Community, and Inclusion
• Category 8: Quebec Leadership and Francophone Perspectives
• Category 9: Research Infrastructure, Data, and Knowledge Translation
• Category 10: Systemic Voices and Cross-Cutting Leaders
The compilers of the list note that whilst there are significant international contributions to the conversation on ECE in Canada, they “chose to dedicate all 50 slots to people whose work is specifically focused on early childhood education and care in Canada, because we believed readers in this field would benefit more from a list that reflected the depth of Canada-specific expertise than one that repeated names they have already encountered many times…. Every person on the final list passed the test of having made early childhood education and care in Canada their central professional commitment.”
The list identifies several common mistakes for organization to avoid in Early Childhood Leadership:
• Treating the research as a to-do list rather than as a way of understanding children: “When leaders read about the importance of play-based learning, they sometimes try to implement play as a programme element rather than genuinely shifting their understanding of what learning looks like in the early years. The result is play that is still structured, adult-directed, and outcome-focused in ways that undermine its developmental purpose.”
• Treating the workforce crisis as primarily a recruitment problem rather than a compensation and professional recognition problem: “Until compensation reflects the qualifications, skill, and responsibility of the work, no amount of recruitment effort will produce a sustainable workforce. This is one of the clearest messages from researchers including Emis Akbari, Kerry McCuaig, and Martha Friendly.”
• Assuming that policy success at the system level translates automatically to improved experience at the centre level: “Directors and leaders of early childhood organizations carry significant responsibility for the cultural and pedagogical environment of their settings, and no federal agreement substitutes for that leadership.”
• Failing to engage with Indigenous perspectives and contexts except as a compliance exercise: “The work of Margo Greenwood, Patsy McKinney, Amanda Pont-Shanks, and Fikile Nxumalo makes clear that genuine integration of Indigenous perspectives into early childhood education requires sustained learning, relationship building, and willingness to fundamentally reconsider assumptions about what early childhood is for and how it should work.”
• Underestimating the power of the outdoor environment: “The research of Mariana Brussoni, Megan Zeni, and Eva Oberle consistently shows that risky outdoor play and unstructured time in nature produce outcomes that no indoor curriculum can replicate. Early childhood organizations that minimize outdoor time for risk management reasons or logistical convenience are making a choice that the evidence does not support.”
Finally, the document provides an Implementation Guide for taking action on the list:
1. Act on the list: “Start by following five on the 50 people on LInkedIn or on their institutional pages and reading one piece of their recent work. Choose people whose disciplinary perspective is different from your own.”
2. Bring this list into a conversation with your team: “Ask each team member to choose one person from the list who they do not know and to spend 30 minutes reading their work. Then meet to discuss what you found.”
3. Take the research seriously: “The leaders on this list have collectively produced hundreds of peer-reviewed papers, policy reports, and books. Their conclusions do not always point in the same direction. Sit with the complexity, including the tension between play-based approaches and literacy outcome pressures, between workforce advocacy and budget realities, and between universal access and the particular needs of Indigenous and marginalised communities.”
4. Consider how your organization’s internal culture, team dynamics, and communication practices are affecting your capacity to implement anything you learn: “The best research in the world does not change children’s experiences if the team responsible for acting on it cannot communicate clearly, hold each other accountable, or resolve the conflicts that inevitably arise when change is underway.”
5. Share what you learn: “The early childhood field advances when practitioners, researchers, advocates, and policymakers are in genuine conversation with each other. Tag the people on this list when you share their work. Participate in the communities they are building.”