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• Leading schools
  • Developing leadership in your school
    • Coaching and mentoring
      • About coaching
      • What makes a good coach?
      • What are the benefits of coaching?
      • How do I develop coaching in my school or organisation?
      • How can coaching improve teaching and learning?
      • Case studies

About coaching

The arguments for investing in the development of others emerge from a number of different strands of the National College’s work. Whether it is the realisation that leadership needs to be shared widely in the context of school leaders, or the quest to ensure that there are sufficient future leaders in the system to secure succession when the current generation moves on, there is remarkable convergence about the importance of coaching.

We also believe that school leaders who invest time in developing coaching help staff to see the complementary nature of coaching and current, highly significant initiatives in education, and so to derive greater value from them.

To support this belief, we set out six propositions about the importance of coaching and the role of school leaders:

• Leaders have a moral responsibility to promote everyone’s learning - that of both adults and pupils.
• Leaders have a moral imperative to develop the next generation of school leaders.
• High-quality coaching in schools supports professional development, leadership sustainability and school improvement.
• Leaders have a responsibility to provide the processes, structures and resources that support coaching.
• Central to these propositions is the role of learning conversations, which make tacit knowledge explicit and engage staff in open and honest debate.
• Leaders should model the dialogue and personal approaches that create a culture of high-quality coaching interactions across their school.

“Coaching is about unlocking potential in order to maximise performance – it’s about bringing out the best in people.”

Further reading on these six propositions is available in the publication Leading Coaching in Schools.

There are several models of coaching that schools, networks and other groups have used as part of their professional development programme.These will share certain characteristics and are often based on one of the following:

• The National Strategy materials (DfES, 2004)
• The National College who use models within a number of their programmes including Leading from the Middle and the National Professional Qualification in Headship (NPQH).
• CUREE (the Centre for Use of Research and Evidence in Education) who have developed modules about effective coaching and mentoring.
• Commercial materials offering different approaches to coaching.
• Higher Education and Master level professional development courses which include a coaching element.

Defining features of coaching

The CfLaT (Centre for Learning and Teaching) research team have defined coaching as having the following features:

Coaching for teaching and learning

Developing more effective coaching in schools can have a very positive and significant impact on teaching and learning itself. In the publication 'Coaching for teaching and learning: a practical guide for schools', it states:

Teachers' learning and development underpins school improvement  and provides a vehicle for raising achievement and attainment. When teachers' learning is based on their genuine assessment and understanding of pupils' learning they can start to make adaptations to their practice which can lead to real differences in outcomes. In the Education Practice series, Helen Timperley's 2009 summary 'Teacher professional learning and development' identifies these core principle. Amongst these is the need to create conditions which allow:

• teachers to experience and develop understanding of an integration of knowledge and skills
• teachers to gain multiple opportunities to learn and apply information
• teachers' beliefs to be challenged by evidence which is not consistent with their assumptions
• teachers to have opportunities to process new learning with others

More information on coaching for teaching and learning.