Compliance gets a lot of attention in early childhood education. And rightly so. But what about the people delivering that care every day?

Phil Wolffe, Director and Workplace Wellness Expert at Kinex Health, has spent over a decade designing bespoke health and wellbeing programs across Australia. For the last several years, his focus has been squarely on ECEC — because he believes educator wellbeing is where the sector’s biggest lever for change sits.

We sat down with Phil to talk about what the wellbeing gap really looks like, why skilling up matters as much as supporting, and what practical steps leaders can take right now.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to focus on leadership in early childhood education?

I’ve been in workplace wellbeing for over 15 years, and running Kinex Health for eight of those. We came to the ECEC sector through another company we had at the time, which was focused on infection control. The deeper we got into early childhood, the more we saw that the biggest issue wasn’t infection — it was wellbeing. Burnout, stress, staffing pressure, energy levels. All the things that affect how educators show up every day, which in turn affects outcomes for children.

Wellbeing is the linchpin. It is upstream from everything. There’s an old saying: a healthy person has a thousand goals, and an unhealthy person has one. That’s what we kept seeing. So we put our workplace wellbeing expertise together with our sector experience, and that naturally led us to where we are now.

What is it about the ECEC sector specifically that drew you in?

I love the sector. I love the people in it. It’s such a passionate group — sometimes too passionate. And I think that’s part of the problem. Educators are constantly giving without giving enough to themselves. What we want to do is create the conditions and build the skills to help educators care for themselves first, so they can better care for children and each other.

The further we dug into it, the more invested we became. We’ve partnered with the Early Childhood Educators Wellbeing Project at Macquarie University, and we’ve co-designed a number of services specifically for the sector. ECEC is where I believe we can have the greatest ripple effect — better educator wellbeing leads to better outcomes for children, which leads to better outcomes for the country as a whole.

You talk about wellbeing gap in the sector. What does that actually look like in practice?

The wellbeing gap exists across the entire sector, but it’s worse in regional, rural and remote areas. We see higher rates of burnout in ECEC compared to the general population, and more than three times the turnover. The sector needs workforce growth of around 3 to 5% over the next five to six years, and we’re not on track to get there. That puts more strain on the educators who remain, and that pressure compounds as you move further from urban centres.

In regional and remote areas, you lose the resources and support networks that city-based services take for granted. If someone calls in sick, you might be drawing from the entire local ECEC workforce already — there’s no one to step in. A centre director might be the only person for 100 kilometres doing what they do. That isolation is real and it’s significant.

When leaders recognise that pressure in their team, where do you recommend they start?

The instinct is often to add something — a new service, a new process, a new program. But sometimes the answer is actually to scale back and simplify first. The best no-cost starting point is just opening a genuine dialogue with staff. Check in. Find out where their pain points actually are, because they’re often not where you think they’ll be. And importantly, your people will often have the answers too — not just the problems.

Beyond that, I’d focus on skilling. We tend to assume people have foundational health and wellbeing knowledge — that they know how much sleep they need, how to eat well, how to manage their energy, how to navigate conflict. But these are skill sets, not instincts. Without them, we’re asking people to figure it out in a high-stress, high-stakes, constant-pressure environment. That’s not a strategy.

Can you walk us through what that looks like when you work with a centre?

One example that comes to mind — we’ve been working with a centre for over a year now. When we first surveyed the team, the data was clear: junk food and alcohol were high, sleep quality was low, daily steps were low despite educators being on their feet all day, and subjective energy levels were really low. When you see that pattern, you know the foundations aren’t right, and everything else is going to suffer as a result.

So we didn’t try to tackle everything at once. We started with sleep — what does each person need at baseline, what would they ideally get? We called it their sustainable wellbeing zone and worked on that for a couple of months. Then we moved to nutrition. Just increasing protein and vegetable intake, without touching anything else, produced noticeable gains in energy and mental clarity. Then we looked at movement — not marathons and gym memberships, just more meaningful movement than people were already doing. Walking groups, morning stretches, evening walks. Simple things done together.

Working on those three things progressively over nine or ten months, we saw real improvements across every health marker we track — energy, mental health, physical health. It’s not always a complicated policy or a big system change. Sometimes it’s just focusing on the real things people need.

What role does leadership commitment play in making this work?

It’s the number one thing. I’ve said it many times: if leadership has accepted that wellbeing deserves their attention, effort and energy, that is more than half the battle. Now you’re just talking logistics.

When the leadership team in this centre committed to it, everything became much easier — because staff could see it was a genuine strategic priority, not lip service. It wasn’t something extra to do on top of everything else. It was part of their objectives. When that’s the case, engaging in the process feels normal. It actually feels like you’re being rewarded for it. And when that happens, everyone gets involved.

It’s sometimes slow to build momentum, but once you build it, you’re rolling downhill.

What’s the core message you’d want ECEC leaders to take away from this?

Highly skilled people in well-supported environments produce great outcomes. Flip that — low wellbeing skills in high-pressure environments — and you get burnout, rising conflict, and staff leaving. The sector is already under enough pressure. Leaders have more influence over that equation than they often realise.

You don’t need a big budget or a perfect program to start. You need commitment. Start with your people. Ask them what they need. Build the skills. And know that every step you take to support your team flows through — to the children, and to the sector as a whole.