Distributed Leadership In Early Years Education

The younger generation ought to have the best foundation in their early years experience in order to prepare them for the challenges they will face as they move forward into adulthood. Therefore, the quality of early years education has significant impact on children’s development. Who can influence the quality of the early years setting? Leader plays a vital role in establish a positive relationship and team culture among staff in order to provide a meaningful learning environment for children. There is a large volume of published studies describing that effective leader is essential to the high quality of early years setting (Lewis and Hill, 2012). The type of leadership leader adopts are important in improving the quality of service delivery

2003, cited in Bolden 2011) distributed leadership has been defined as a group activity which people contribute to the organization instead of an individual bare all the responsibility. In early years setting, it is a thoughtful process of sharing leadership behavior, so that team members other than the head of the centre take an active lead. Distributed leaders allow team member to bare some areas of responsibility rather than all depend on themselves. Distributed leadership is the most effective leadership in early childhood settings as it is a type of leadership that involves multiple person to share responsibility (Heikka and Hujala, 2013). It involve as many as hands, brains, eyes, ears to commit rather than few. For example , principal of the centre assigns the position of supervisor of each age group in the centre, these supervisors responsible of their own age group, they have the power to make decision , they in charge in settle class teacher problem and any issues happens around the age group they are handling. Shared responsibility of staff enable the head of the centre to have less pressure in settling all matter which provide more time for them to seek for other way to enhance the quality of the

Heikka et al. (2012) suggest that distributed leader create the learning culture as it relies on building relationship and emphasis on personal proficiency in the settings. According to Gardner (2010) people has different types of intelligent. This happens in early years setting as well. Different staffs has their strength in different areas. Distributed leader empower team members on sharing responsibilities allows them to learn from each other. ongoing learning. Effective communication indirectly promote knowledge sharing as well. According to Zhang and Faerman (2007) distributed leadership involve multi members from the settings, none could achieve the same level of effectiveness without the active influences from others. This create a day-to-day learning knowledge platform for team members to develop and keep on