Lerni.
Professional Supervision Clinical Supervision About Insights
Sectors
Locations
Supervision for my team I need individual supervision
Home / Insights / Early Learning
From our Clinical Director

Different Centres, Same Story

Rebecca Johnson Rebecca Johnson, Clinical Director and Psychologist, Lerni · 3 min read · 21 August 2026

I’ve just come back from a few weeks of leave. Long lunches, sight seeing round Spain and Italy, properly switching off for the first time in longer than I’ll admit. I’m back now, rested and ready for the second half of the year with my supervisees, and if you’d asked me a month ago whether I needed that break, I probably would have brushed the question off, yup I am guilty of not following my own advice.

While I was away I spent a lot of time explaining to family, friends, and new holiday acquaintances why Lerni exists, and why I care so much about Professional Supervision being available to every Centre Director, not just the ones lucky enough to work somewhere that already offers it. Saying it out loud, over and over, to people outside the sector, made something click for me that I think I’d known for a while without properly naming.

The Directors I sit with work for completely different organisations, different states, different sizes, different owners, different philosophies, and yet the same list comes up almost word for word, session after session.

• The ongoing media spotlight on the sector, and the toll of representing an industry every time it’s in the news for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
• The shift in how families communicate with educators, and how that’s left some of your team frozen, genuinely unsure how to respond to a parent without worrying it’ll turn into a complaint, internal or external.
• The pressure of rolling out GECCKO and the new mandatory child safety training, on top of everything else, and getting every single educator through it in time.
• The constant conversations about occupancy and hours, and what that means for rosters, for budgets, for whether a service is viable at all.
• Inclusion support that’s harder to access than it should be, for the children who need it most.
• Burnout that’s tipped into something closer to blocked care, where you’re still showing up, still doing the job, but the part of you that used to feel it has gone quiet.
• Children’s behaviour changing in ways that are hard to keep up with, while the funding and policy settings underneath it all keep shifting too.
• Trying to hold something like work life balance, in a role that was never really built with one in mind.
• And underneath all of it, being everyone’s co-regulator, the person the whole centre borrows their calm from, with no real time carved out to notice what you need.

That’s the list, and it doesn’t seem to matter which provider you work for, it’s the same one everywhere.

So when I say I’m passionate about this work, this is what I mean. Providing a space to talk about all of it, and sometimes to rant, or cry, or laugh, is why I do this. Giving someone an hour a month where they feel properly heard, properly seen, properly looked after, is why I do this. Offering a bit of room to reflect, a bit more hope, a bit more belief in your own judgement, is why I do this.

I’m back now, properly recharged, and just as glad to do it. To walk alongside the Directors we work with, and to offer the kind of emotional safety this role asks you to give everyone else, but rarely gets handed back.

If any of that list sounded familiar, and you don’t currently have anywhere to put it, we should talk.

Talk to us about supervision for your team

Whether that is a small coordination team or your whole workforce, we start with what your staff are actually dealing with.