Mentoring is a reciprocal and collaborative learning relationship in which a more experienced or more knowledgeable person helps to guide a less experienced or less knowledgeable person to explore and build their potential. Whilst mentoring definitions across disciplines abound, numerous models of mentoring have produced benefits and positive outcomes for both mentors and mentees. In Education, much of the research has centred on the importance of ‘induction and mentoring’, that is, preservice teachers and their enculturation into the profession with the support of mentor teachers (Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group, 2014). Mentoring is also significant in the development of a professional identify in teaching (Rippon & Martin, 2003), supporting mentees to identify themselves as competent professional insiders (Johnson, 2007). It also has benefits for cognitive and social- emotional aspects of learning for early childhood educators (Peterson et al., 2010). Given the imperative to develop robust frameworks that support early childhood teachers’ professional growth and the requirement for all long day care centres in Australia to appoint an educational leader, this exploratory investigation probed the relationship between mentoring and leadership. It aimed to explore connections between mentoring and leadership because of the potential for mentoring to be an effective tool to build leadership practices in early childhood education contexts, and the seeming lack of association between these factors in the early childhood leadership literature. In this exploratory pilot study, semi-structured individual interviews were undertaken with 10 early childhood educators in long day care centres in two Australian capital cities to learn about participants’ experiences of mentoring, leadership, and connections between mentoring and leadership. A preliminary deductive analysis (Creswell, 2014) using relational, developmental and contextual elements of mentoring (Ambrosetti, Kinght, & Dekkers, 2014) indicated unexpectedly, that understandings and experiences of both formal and informal mentoring are wide-ranging, as are understandings and experiences of leadership. Concepts of leadership (Stamopoulos & Barblett, 2018) and concepts of mentoring (Zachery in Rodd, 2013, p. 174) from the early childhood literature were contrasted as a way of identifying the place of leading through mentoring. Of greater note was the powerful role of mentoring as continuous professional learning and the reiterative nature of the construction and reconstruction of professional identity.

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