School leadership can come with joy, weight and loneliness, and the challenge of sustaining the self in the role long term. Adding to the alarming data from the longitudinal Australian Principal Occupational, Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey, which shows the deteriorating mental health of school principals and high intention to quit their jobs, is the recent report by Professor Jane Wilkinson et al. (2025) on the invisible emotional labour and psychosocial risks of principal work.

At this week’s Australian Secondary Principals’ Association National Summit in Canberra, Federal Education Minister, The Hon Jason Clare MP, announced that the Commonwealth will contribute funding to a national pilot for reflective supervision for principals, coordinated by Headspace, in response to growing concern about the health and wellbeing of school leaders.

This week, I also completed my second two-day intensive for the Reflective Supervision in Education course at the University of Sydney, led by Professor Michael Anderson, Associate Professor Reverend Geoff Broughton and Associate Professor Mary Ann Hunter.

Recommendation 3 of the Unveiling the Ripple Effect: How Offensive Behaviours Impact School Leaders’ Productivity report (Dicke et al., 2025) is to institutionalise professional supervision and reflective practice for school leaders through a range of implementation actions. This, the authors argue, will create a systematic avenue for leaders to process complex experiences, strengthen coping mechanisms, and enhance professional growth.

Given these intersecting moments and the emergence of supervision for educators, this post explores what supervision might offer school leaders and the education system.

Reflective supervision is something Kristen Douglas and I talked about in a 2025 The Edu Salon podcast episode. In the episode Kristen explains that leaders need to “slow down to speed up”, with “down tools, balcony view, reflective practice” time to “talk, process and offset”. More recently, Associate Professor Paul Kidson and I spoke about reflective supervision on the podcast, with Paul pointing out that supervision is about principals’ work being sustainable so that “they can turn up in their work as humans to be able to serve their communities as best they can.”

As a school principal and coach whose PhD explored transformational professional learning, I have been intrigued by the concept of ‘supervision’ as I learn more about it and train to become a supervisor myself. What follows are my reflections at this moment in my journey.

Supervision is like and unlike it sounds. It is not ‘to supervise’ or oversee. Rather, it is about resourcing the self, and providing a space for someone to develop or experience “super vision” or a kind of super-seeing – a broader range of perspectives about their work leading to reflection, insight and ignition. In this way, it can be a useful process to support school leaders to make decisions amid complexity, hone their ethical and relational judgement, and mitigate the isolation they might find in their roles.

One metaphor for an aspect of what supervision offers is ‘pit time’, referencing the time coal miners were given for the restorative washing off of the grime of the day’s work, in order to enter their home and personal lives unmarred by the muck of the day. Supervision can offer a place for school leaders to find renewal and rejuvenation, remaining deeply engaged in the work of being with and for community, while being with and for themselves. It can help people to show up with intentionality and authenticity, at work and at home. However, if supervision is positioned only as a download space or wellbeing support, we risk underestimating its role in professional judgement, ethical decision making, and sustainable leadership practice.

Especially intriguing to me is the place of and for ‘soul’ in supervision. Michael Paterson (2019) says that “at the heart of reflective practice lies a dialogue between Soul, Role and Context” (p.15). He describes ‘soul’ as what makes a person tick, what gets them out of bed in the morning, and what fires them up from the inside with purpose and meaning. He challenges us to ask: “How do your soul and role fare at work? How do the requirements of your role sit with your deepest values? How does your context inhibit or release you for others? To what do you default at work: context, role or soul?” (p.16).

I am also particularly struck by Parker Palmer’s confronting statement that “as we become more obsessed with succeeding, or at least surviving … we lose touch with our souls and disappear into our roles” (p.15), at great cost to our sense of self, alignment, purpose and connection. I have been sitting with the discomfort of that question.

Do we lose touch with our soul as we disappear into our role? How might supervision connect soul, role and context?

Often in mentoring or coaching relationships, we explore, tease out and dig deep into our roles and our contexts, leading us to operationalise and positively act to perform in our roles and serve our contexts. Supervision occurs at the nexus of soul, role and context, attending to the inner world, core purpose, the crux of our heart and self in our work, and the interconnectedness of us as human beings in ecosystems of individuals, groups, structures and systems.

Supervision, I am discovering, is something that happens in relationship. It is a ‘walking together’ in reflective dialogue that opens, broadens, deepens, nudges and uplifts, moving us beyond the immediacy of events or the desire for a quick fix. In the walking together, supervisee and supervisor engage in a multiplicity of the whats and whos of professional practice. What is going on for someone externally and internally? Who is affected by the way they approach their work, and in what ways? What might they draw upon or do to better serve those in their communities?

Supervision invites a different pace to the day to day. A slowing down, an introspection, and a space of openness and safety. It can help us untangle complexity or notice what was previously peripheral, or unarticulated, or limited by habit. It can challenge us to look inwardly to places we might not normally allow ourselves to go or to awaken parts of ourselves we have pushed aside or dampened. It might ask us to put down the armour momentarily to consider our softness and vulnerabilities – something school leaders often train ourselves to harden in the name of resilience, performance and survival in the job. It can also invite us to look outwardly at those unseen others affected by the ways in which we engage in our work.

I am reminded of Christian van Nieuwerburgh’s work on a coaching way of being, and the importance of attending to the energy, words and needs of the person in front of you. I am reminded of Trista Hollweck’s work on professional accompaniment as a reciprocal learning journey involving walking alongside others with curiosity, empathy, nonjudgement and compassion. Supervision is a practice of accompaniment, attunement and presence that serves the supervisee and also those unseen others influenced by the way they show up. It works through intense listening, absolute presence, intentional questions, naming what might otherwise remain unspoken, and appropriate challenge, through a balance of intuitive and technical decisions by the supervisor, and the relational interplay between supervisee and supervisor.

In the current policy landscape, and at a time where much of the language of leadership is oriented towards direction, influence, and decision-making, supervision offers a way of approaching practice that values attention, curiosity, and the willingness to sit with uncertainty. In a profession characterised by pace and pressure, it offers a different kind of space in which leaders might come to know their work, and themselves, differently. In this moment of policy attention, how supervision is understood and enacted will shape its contribution to professional practice, resilience, and the sustainability of school leadership.

References

Dicke, T., Rowston, K., Basarkod, G., Jardine, A., Clarke, T., Ko, H., & APPA, (2025). Unveiling the Ripple Effect: How Offensive Behaviours Impact School Leaders’ Productivity (APPA and IPPE Report). Sydney: Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University.

Paterson, M. (2019). Discipled by praxis: Soul and role in context. Practical Theology, 12(1), 7-19.

Palmer, P. J. (2004). A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life. San Francisco, CA, Jossy-Bass.

Wilkinson, J., Walsh, L. Grice, C., Longmuir, F., Chandler, P., Keddie, A., & Delany, T. (2025). Invisible Labour: Principals’ Emotional Labour in Volatile Times. Report One: Technical Overview of the Project. Monash University.