Why we made quality and compliance a leadership role of its own

Bask Early Learning has split quality and compliance into its own non-contact leadership role, sitting alongside our educational leader. Here is the thinking behind the change.

At most early learning services, quality and compliance sits inside a job that is already full. At ours, it used to live with a non-contact assistant centre manager who also carried rosters, family enquiries and staffing gaps. Compliance was on the list. It was rarely at the top of it.

We decided that arrangement was a design problem rather than a people problem. So we changed the design.

We have created a dedicated Quality and Compliance Leader role at every Bask centre. It is a non-contact position that sits alongside our educational leader, with our centre manager leading the team. The centre manager holds the operation together. The educational leader owns education and care, with time to mentor educators and lift pedagogy. The Quality and Compliance Leader owns risk management, internal audits, policy implementation, records and Assessment and Rating readiness.

These are genuinely different jobs. Pedagogical leadership asks for one set of skills. Compliance leadership asks for another: a sound grasp of the National Law, the National Regulations and the National Quality Standard, plus the discipline to turn all of it into consistent everyday practice. Asking one person to do both well, on top of running a centre, was never realistic.

Taking Quality Area 7 seriously

Quality Area 7 of the National Quality Standard covers governance and leadership, and it quietly underpins every other area. Strong governance is what lets educators focus on children, because the systems around them are sound and the expectations are clear.

Our Quality and Compliance Leader keeps child and staff records audit-ready year round, runs internal audits and risk assessments as routine, and treats Assessment and Rating readiness as an ongoing state rather than a one-off event. It reflects a wider shift across the sector, where leading services increasingly treat compliance as strategic infrastructure that builds resilience rather than a burden to get through.

From checklist to habit

For us, the point is cultural. We want compliance to be how our teams work every day, not something they perform when someone is watching. That happens through coaching rather than policing.

When an educator knows why a requirement exists and how to meet it, compliance stops feeling like a threat. It becomes part of good practice.

There is a safety argument too. In a culture built on fear, people hide problems. In a culture built on confidence, they raise them early, while they are still small and fixable. A leader whose job is to support rather than catch people out makes it more likely that concerns surface when they should.

A network, not a title

We have built support around the role so no leader works alone. Each centre's Quality and Compliance Leader is mentored by our Head of Quality and Compliance, Priscilla Farry, who connects the work across centres and holds it to a consistent standard.

We also run monthly leadership forums, one for each role. Our centre managers meet as a group, our educational leaders as a group, and our Quality and Compliance Leaders as a group. Each forum focuses on one leadership area and unpacks the latest sector updates, so our leaders hear about regulatory change early and take that knowledge straight back to their teams.

An investment, not an overhead

For a growing business, resourcing compliance this heavily is a deliberate choice. We recently opened our fourth centre and could have kept the function lean. Instead we put quality and compliance in leadership at every site, with time protected to do the work properly.

We think this is where the sector is heading. As child safety reforms continue and regulatory expectations rise, the services that thrive will be the ones that resource quality and compliance as core leadership work.

We have already appointed a Quality and Compliance Leader at each of our existing centres. The role at our newest service in Ellen Grove, Brisbane is the first we have opened to candidates from outside our organisation.

Author:

Giselle Rayward is Chief of Strategy and Integration at Bask Early Learning, a family owned early education provider in South East Queensland. She leads people and culture, compliance, and operations across the Bask network. Her work is driven by lifting quality standards in Australian early childhood education and care.