The Research

When we think about leadership, we often assume our ideas are shaped later in life—through education, work, and experience. Yet our assumptions about what a leader looks like, how they behave, and who gets to lead begin much earlier. By the age of five, and sometimes before, children are already developing internal models of leadership. These early understandings, known as Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs), are shaped by children’s lived experiences, environments, and social worlds.

Our research, based on a multi-method study with over 250 Australian primary school children aged 5 to 12 that explored how children construct and express leadership ideas through drawings, narratives, and interviews, found that children are not passive recipients of adult-defined ideals, they actively make sense of leadership, often in sophisticated ways.

Some of our key findings:

• Ideas evolve in waves, not stages. Rather than progressing in fixed steps, children’s leadership thinking moves in overlapping waves, where different ideas co-exist, compete, and build over time. This dynamic process challenges stage-based leadership development models.

• Social context is not peripheral—it is foundational. Children’s implicit leadership theories (ILTs) are shaped through continuous exposure to their environments: the behaviours of teachers and families, the narratives in media, and the actions of community and public leaders. These influences do more than inform—they actively construct children’s understanding of who can lead. Depending on what is modelled and valued, social context can entrench exclusionary stereotypes or open pathways to more expansive and inclusive leadership ideals.

• Age groups show clear patterns, yet also variability. Younger children often describe leadership in physical or spatial terms—such as being the fastest, oldest, or first in line—and are the most likely to depict themselves as leaders. Middle-years students typically adopt a functional view, seeing leaders as those who make decisions, give instructions, or hold authority. By the later years of primary school, children increasingly introduce socio-emotional and humanitarian dimensions, describing leaders who inspire others or drive social change. However, these developmental trends are not fixed: some six-year-olds express deeply humanitarian ideas, while some twelve-year-olds still describe leadership in physical or hierarchical terms. This variability reminds us that leadership thinking can be expansive at any age.

• Biases appear early. Gendered and racialised associations with leadership emerge early. Boys overwhelmingly depicted male leaders (98%), while girls showed more variation (70% female, dropping to 40% in Grade 6). This decline may reflect a lack of visible female humanitarian role models at the older age. First Nations representation was almost entirely absent, with only one child drawing an Indigenous leader.

• Leadership is rarely framed as playful. Across age groups, children’s representations of leadership were predominantly grounded in real-world social and institutional settings—such as politics, public platforms, entertainment landscapes, and formal roles—rather than games or imaginative fantasy. While elements of humour and creativity did occasionally appear, these were typically embedded within recognisable adult leadership contexts or expressed as hopeful visions of what leadership could be. This suggests that children already perceive leadership as a serious, adult-aligned social practice, shaped by existing power structures and societal norms. Such framing may constrain how children imagine themselves as leaders, positioning leadership as distant or deferred rather than accessible and developmental.

• Children value inclusion, fairness, and care. Despite internalised biases, many children expressed a desire for leaders who are kind, fair, and inclusive. This highlights the potential to nurture broader, more ethical leadership values—if we begin early enough.

These findings tell a clear story: leadership concepts begin early, evolve in complex and variable ways, and are profoundly shaped by the social and cultural environments children navigate. By understanding how children think about leadership, Children & Leadership Futures seeks to intervene at the roots—expanding leadership imagination, challenging narrow norms, and fostering more equitable, inclusive leadership cultures from the ground up.

Achieving this vision requires collective effort. We invite educators, researchers, policymakers, organisations, and community leaders to work with us in reimagining leadership—starting with the youngest minds and building towards a more just, creative, and representative future.

Researcher: Can you please describe the drawing to me?

Boy: Ok, there’s the leader and he’s saying stuff he wants to change about the world and what he wants to do with the world like he wants to say that he wants to change it and there’s a power point about how he’ll change the world and there’s the people watching, there’s sixty but I couldn’t fit all the sixty I couldn’t have enough time to do all sixty so I just wrote x60

Researcher: Can you tell me more about where it’s happening?

Boy: Parliament House in Australia, Canberra

Researcher: Can you tell me a bit more about the leader, what’s he like?

Boy: He is like a he’s a high leader like Liberal or Labor and he wants people to work for him so he can change the world or change Australia to make it a better place and that’s what the leader wants pretty much.

Researcher: If you would have used colours, what kind of colours do you think he would have?

Boy:  He would be wearing a suit, he would do his hair like put it to one side or something like that black hair. And a suit and pants

Researcher: Who are the 60?

Boy: They are voters, so they came to listen about his speech and about 10 of them are probably recording it for TV.