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Section 2 of 6
Pathway 1: Maintaining curiosity

Why maintaining curiosity is important for practice supervisors

Maintaining curiosity as a practice supervisor is essential for effective leadership, particularly in social care where biases and assumptions can significantly affect decision-making and outcomes.

Curiosity encourages you to continuously question your own assumptions and explore how your values, motivations, and experiences influence your actions and relationships with others.

By remaining curious, you actively engage in reflective practice, which helps to uncover and address prejudices and biases - both conscious and unconscious - that could otherwise go unchecked.

A curious approach can help you to: 

Enhance professional development  

Curiosity encourages continuous learning, motivating supervisors to identify growth areas and regularly assess strengths and weaknesses. 

Improve supervisory practice  

A curious leader uses reflective practice to explore team dynamics and decision-making, grounding supervision in exploration rather than routine. 

Uncover and address bias

Curiosity drives practice supervisors to examine their own biases and triggers, helping to build a more inclusive and equitable environment.

Develop better decision-making

Asking insightful questions and considering diverse viewpoints enables practice supervisors to make well-informed, fair decisions centred on the best interests of children and families.

Without curiosity, practice supervisors may fall back on assumptions and miss chances for growth, impacting both their development and the effectiveness of their team, ultimately affecting outcomes for children and families.

Over to you

Spend 10 minutes reflecting on the following questions as part of your practice: 

  • What recent decisions or actions could have benefited from greater curiosity?
  • Are there areas of your supervisory practice where assumptions or routines have replaced curiosity and deeper reflection?

Now, choose one area of your supervisory practice (for example, team feedback or decision-making) and apply a curiosity-driven approach.

Reflect on how this influences the outcome and document what you learn in your action plan.

Share your insights with a peer or in your next supervision session.

You can use the ‘Why maintaining curiosity is important as a practice supervisor’ section in your 4C leadership capability framework action plan for this activity.

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The resources have been developed by Frontline in collaboration with DfE.
Published: 30 January 2025
Last updated: 30 January 2025