Collection: The Good Experts Podcast
‘A decent CEO sticks around when things are hard’ – June O’Sullivan, CEO of the London Early Years Foundation
Good Leaders Podcast, Episode 19: One of the most respected social enterprise leaders in the UK, June O’Sullivan has led LEYF for the past two decades, overcoming the hardest challenges with her characteristic combination of determination and stubbornness. Speaking to Tim West, she gives us a lesson in social enterprise, impact and leadership.
In this episode, host Tim West talks to one of the longest serving and most respected social enterprise leaders in the UK: June O’Sullivan, the multi-award winning CEO of the London Early Years Foundation (LEYF).
O’Sullivan has an OBE, won a King’s Awards for Enterprise this year and has collected countless accolades including the WISE100 Social Business Woman of the Year 2025 and was named SE100 Leader of the Year in 2021.
Twenty years ago, she became the CEO of LEYF, which was then a small charity struggling to keep its eight nurseries afloat in Westminster.
She soon realised the importance of having a sustainable business model that didn’t rely on grants, so she turned LEYF into a successful social enterprise, where fee-charging nurseries cross-subsidise a portion of the places.Three-quarters of LEYF’s nurseries are located in disadvantaged neighbourhoods helping to achieve the enterprise’s mission of providing quality early years education which is accessible to all.
LEYF now has a turnover of £40m and numbers 43 nurseries – nearly half of which are rated “outstanding” by education standards agency Ofsted (compared with just 16% of nurseries being awarded the top rating in the UK).
It has not always been easy for the self-described “social pedagogue”, who emphasises that she cares first and foremost about the children and the crucial role their youngest years play in shaping their futures. From the start, convincing the board to agree the switch to a social enterprise model required “a combination of determination, patience, irritation, subterfuge and influencing in equal measure”, O’Sullivan recalls.
LEYF went through challenging times, explains O’Sullivan – from mixed experiences with social investors to ministers “just making the wrong decisions” – but to say O’Sullivan is determined is a euphemism. “I can be a bit of a pain,” she admits.
What kept her going? “Pure stubbornness,” she responds. And the staff: she couldn’t possibly abandon them. “A decent CEO sticks around when things are hard.”
Being the leader isn’t really what matters to her: “I’m not driven by being the CEO. I’m driven by the purpose.”
Nowadays, 20% of nurseries in the UK are owned by private equity funds, she says, that are building large, “extractive models” without the needs of children at their core.
LEYF presents an alternative model – and O’Sullivan explains it can be replicated. In Australia, Goodstart, which operates on a similar model to LEYF, is now the country’s largest provider of early years care.
O’Sullivan talks about:
- How she turned LEYF into a thriving social enterprise supporting more than 4,000 children
- What makes a strong social enterprise – and social enterprise leader
- Her personal journey that led to her determination to social justice
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