James Haughton, CEO, Pestalozzi International
When we think about leadership, we often picture adults in positions of authority. We imagine people running organisations, shaping policy, or leading movements. Yet leadership does not begin in adulthood. It begins much earlier, when children start forming beliefs about who they are, whether their voice matters, and whether they can influence the world around them.
The foundations of leadership are formed at the same time as identity. In parts of rural Zambia, only 1 in 33 young people from disadvantaged backgrounds complete secondary school. Even the most capable children rarely have the opportunity to combine lived experience with knowledge, ambition and practical skill to solve their community's problems.
If we want homegrown solutions to poverty's intransigent challenges, we should not be waiting for universal access to basic education before we consider what we can do to nurture leadership. The evidence for acting early is now strong, and it runs across neuroscience, economics, psychology and longitudinal studies of who becomes a leader and why.
What the research tells us
Research across neuroscience, psychology and education consistently shows that the building blocks of leadership are shaped in childhood and early adolescence. Four bodies of evidence point in the same direction.
The first concerns the internal tools that leadership depends on. Executive function and self-regulation, described by the Harvard Center on the Developing Child as the core skills for life and learning, include emotional regulation, attention control and flexible thinking. These capacities determine whether a young person can manage stress, plan ahead and recover from setbacks, and they are built rapidly in childhood and adolescence through supported practice rather than instruction. They are the substrate that makes responsibility and thoughtful decision-making possible. Without them, no amount of later leadership training has anything to attach to.
The second concerns belief. A person does not attempt to lead unless they believe they can act on the world and change it. Albert Bandura's work on self-efficacy, the belief in one's own capacity to influence events, shows that these beliefs begin to form in early childhood and are strengthened above all by mastery experiences: the direct, repeated discovery that effort produces results. Success raises self-efficacy and unaddressed failure lowers it. For children growing up amid scarcity, where setbacks are frequent and opportunities to succeed at something consequential are rare, the default trajectory bends toward low expectation. That trajectory can be changed, but only by deliberately engineering early experiences of agency and accomplishment.
The third concerns timing and economic logic. Nobel laureate James Heckman has demonstrated that early investment in children carries a multiplier effect, because skills build on skills. The Heckman curve shows that the highest economic returns come from the earliest investments, and his analysis of long-running controlled studies puts the return on high-quality early development at around 13 per cent per year, well above the 7 to 10 per cent typical of later schooling. Leadership development follows the same pattern. It cannot be bolted on at the end of education. It compounds, which means the earlier the foundation, the greater the eventual return.
The fourth, and perhaps most striking, concerns adolescence specifically. Neuroscience now identifies adolescence as a sensitive period, a window when the brain is unusually open to shaping by its social environment. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and colleagues argue that the social brain undergoes structural and functional reorganisation during the second decade of life, making adolescence a sensitive period for sociocultural processing, while Ronald Dahl characterises it as a period of heightened social engagement and goal flexibility. This is the moment when identity forms and ambition either expands or contracts. If we wait until adulthood to speak about leadership, we miss the moment when belief is most malleable.
These developmental claims are confirmed by studies that actually follow people across their lives. Longitudinal research finds a strong association between informal leadership emergence in childhood and the occupancy of formal leadership roles in adulthood. Childhood cognitive capacity and, notably, participation in extracurricular activity predict later leadership emergence, including in independent assessments such as military officer suitability. Other lifespan studies trace a developmental pathway from early temperament, through adolescent social confidence, to adult leadership potential, and show how family circumstances shape leadership chances largely through the opportunities a child is given. The implication is consistent: leaders are not discovered fully formed in adulthood. They are cultivated, and the cultivation begins young.
Crucially, the capacity to lead is learnable rather than fixed. The old assumption that leaders are simply born has been displaced by decades of evidence that leadership develops through experience, reflection and mentorship, and is most effective when begun early, with school-based programmes now being tested through randomised controlled trials. Reviews of positive youth development and social and emotional learning add the practical confirmation: structured programmes that give young people genuine responsibility and the chance to lead produce measurable gains in social and emotional skills, academic outcomes and wellbeing, and reductions in risky behaviour. The largest meta-analysis in the field, covering more than 200 programmes and over 270,000 students, found an eleven percentile-point gain in academic achievement alongside these benefits.
Taken together, the message is unusually clear for educational research. The internal tools, the beliefs, the economic returns and the neurological window all point to the same conclusion: leadership should be developed from childhood, and adolescence is the moment not to be missed.
The Pestalozzi Leadership Pathway
At Pestalozzi International, our response is intentional and structured. We do not treat leadership as an outcome that appears at graduation. We build it progressively through the Pestalozzi Leadership Pathway, and each stage maps deliberately onto what the research says matters.
Belonging. The journey begins at age 11, with stability and inclusion. Students arrive from rural and low-income communities and enter a safe residential environment where expectations are high and support is consistent. The focus is on safety, structure and community. Young people learn that they belong and that their presence matters. This is not a soft preliminary. Executive function and self-regulation only develop in conditions of psychological safety, so belonging is the precondition for everything that follows.
Growth. The Growth stage addresses mindset and identity. Through the Confidence Accelerator, students engage in Mindset Camps that use physical challenges to demonstrate their ability to overcome, alongside Social, Emotional, and Ethical Learning. They build resilience, emotional regulation and ethical judgement. This stage is critical because poverty is not just material; it is also psychological. Scarcity, trauma and low expectation can quietly limit ambition and self-belief, and without intentional intervention these experiences shape identity for life. The Mindset Camps are, in effect, engineered mastery experiences of exactly the kind Bandura's work identifies as the strongest builder of self-efficacy, delivered during the adolescent sensitive period when identity is most open to being shaped.
Active Citizenship. Students develop civic literacy, financial confidence and digital responsibility. They learn how governance systems function, how power operates and how institutions can be engaged constructively. Debate forums, governance workshops and community advocacy activities build systems literacy and public voice. Leadership requires understanding how decisions are made and how influence is exercised, and this stage equips students with that knowledge.
Leaders in Practice. The final stage culminates in a capstone leadership year. Students design, fund and deliver real social impact projects under supervision, learning project planning, budgeting, safeguarding and monitoring. Leadership is no longer theoretical. It is practised with accountability. By the time students graduate, they have experienced leadership in increasingly real contexts over several years, which is precisely the repeated, escalating practice that longitudinal research links to adult leadership.
We describe our holistic delivery method as Head, Heart and Hands, integrating academic strength, ethical grounding and practical action. But it is the Leadership Pathway that provides the progression. It ensures that childhood development translates into adult contribution.
The pathway also includes targeted strands that respond to structural barriers. Our Girls Leadership and Agency strand ensures that girls move beyond access to visible leadership in communities where women have historically been underrepresented. Across every stage the objective remains consistent: to combine lived experience with knowledge, confidence and practical capability, and to keep young people rooted in the communities they understand best.
What impact do we see?
The results of early and sustained leadership development are measurable. 98 per cent of our students complete the Future Leaders Programme. They are seven times more likely to attain a university degree independently, through scholarships they earn, than the national average. 70 per cent either enter public service careers or volunteer in their communities, and many do both. More than seventy NGOs have been founded or are led by alumni. These numbers represent leadership in action, and 97 per cent remain in their home countries, contributing to brain gain rather than brain drain.
Denise grew up in a refugee settlement in Zambia. Through the Growth phase, she strengthened her belief in her own agency. Through Active Citizenship, she developed systems awareness and civic voice. Through Leaders in Practice, she translated insight into action by founding an initiative to help pregnant teenage girls remain in education in the refugee camp she comes from. Today she is a MasterCard Scholar studying International Relations and aspires to work with UNHCR. Her leadership did not begin at graduation. It began when she was a child, and her development was intentionally supported.
A message to supporters and partners
Developing leadership in childhood requires patience and conviction. It requires more than access to schooling. It demands structured opportunities for responsibility, reflection and action over many years.
Our experience, supported by a growing and consistent body of research, shows that when leadership development begins early it shapes identity, strengthens agency and widens ambition. The science of executive function, self-efficacy, early investment and the adolescent brain all converge on the same point, and the lives of our graduates demonstrate it in practice.
If we want leadership that is grounded, accountable and compassionate, we must begin where leadership truly begins.
In childhood.
References
Harvard Center on the Developing Child, Executive Function and Self-Regulation.
Bandura, A., Self-Efficacy: The Theory at the Heart of Human Agency, American Psychological Association.
Heckman, J., The 13% ROI Research; The Heckman Curve.
Blakemore, S.-J. and Mills, K. (2014), Is Adolescence a Sensitive Period for Sociocultural Processing?
Blakemore, S.-J. (2012), Development of the Social Brain in Adolescence.
Development of Self and Identity in Adolescence (2019), neural evidence.
From Classroom to Conscription: Leadership Emergence in Childhood and Early Adulthood.
Reitan, T. and Stenberg, S.-A. (2025), Class in the Classroom: A Cohort Study of Leader Role Occupancy Across the Life Course.
Barling, J. et al. (2023), Early Family Socioeconomic Status and Later Leadership Role Occupancy, Journal of Organizational Behavior.
Jenkins, D. (2020), How Can Leadership Be Taught?
Learning to Lead (2023), School-based leadership cluster randomised controlled trial protocol.
Durlak, J. A. et al. (2011), meta-analysis of social and emotional learning programmes.
Positive Youth Development: Effectiveness, Youth.gov.