The organisation that forgets · Jae Fraser, Little Scholars School of Early Learning
The organisation that forgets Why good practice disappears in early education, and what protects it Jae Fraser · Founder, Little Scholars School of Early Learning
Early in my time in the corporate world, I was part of a decision to fund additional educators across our services, above ratio. The thinking behind it was exactly right. It was about quality. Extra hands meant richer programs, more one-onone time with children, and genuine coverage when educators were away, so a sick day did not mean a stranger from an agency walking into a room full of children who did not know her. The research supported it. The educators had asked for it. Everyone in the centres wanted it. I remember leaving that meeting proud. I was still a teacher at heart, and this felt like the business backing the classroom. By the time it reached an actual service, it had become a line on a roster. What happened to it The intent never travelled with it. Across hundreds of centres, a decision like that passes through so many hands that the why gets stripped away and only the cost remains. In one region it was applied properly. In another it was quietly absorbed into covering absences and nothing more. In others it simply never landed. The educators on the floor had no idea it was ever meant to be about quality. To them it was just hours that appeared some weeks and disappeared others. It changed in the layers, and it changed with the people. At that scale the structure has its own momentum. Every layer the decision passed through had its own targets to protect, and every layer shaved a little off. But the bigger problem was churn. New managers came in who were never in the room when the decision was made. They looked at a wage line they did not understand the history of, and they removed it. Not out of malice, not even out of carelessness. They simply did not know what it was for, and there was nobody close enough to tell them. Across hundreds of centres, no owner can sit down with every leader and explain the intent behind every decision. So the intent dies quietly, one restructure at a time. When I realised it was structural It was watching the same pattern repeat with completely different initiatives, removed by completely different people, for exactly the same reason. Nobody knew why they existed, so nobody protected them. When the people change but the result does not, the problem is not the people. I want to be careful here, because I worked alongside genuinely good people who cared deeply about children.
But good people inside a structure with no memory will still dismantle good things. At that scale, the child is never in the room where decisions get reviewed. The spreadsheet is. That realisation is ultimately why I left, and it is what this paper is about.
Why this keeps happening It would be easy to read that as a story about one company. It is not. It is a structural property of how the sector is measured, and it will repeat anywhere the same conditions exist.
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