Building a Coaching Culture

Creating a coaching culture is not a quick fix, it’s a long-term, relational shift that reimagines how people work, learn, and grow together. It involves embedding coaching not just as a formal intervention, but as a way of being across every layer of school life. From leadership to classrooms, from staff development to student agency, coaching offers a framework for trust, reflection, and growth. This page outlines four interconnected strands that any school or organisation can develop to foster a sustainable, coaching-first culture.

Four Stages

Staff Coaching

The journey often begins with staff. By rethinking traditional performance management structures and appraisal models, schools can begin to replace judgement with joint reflection. Coaching provides a space for teachers to reconnect with their purpose, build confidence, and reflect on their practice with a trusted peer or trained coach.

One effective approach is to introduce peer coaching systems supported by simple frameworks, such as GROW or CLEAR. CPD sessions can model coaching conversations, and staff can be equipped with self-coaching prompts to support their own development between meetings.

When done well, coaching fosters distributed leadership, reduces isolation, and cultivates a culture where professional growth is shared, supported, and self-directed.

Coaching in the Classroom

A true coaching culture is visible in everyday classroom interactions. Teachers who adopt a coaching stance shift from delivering content to facilitating thinking. They create space for students to reflect, problem-solve, and take ownership of their learning.

This might look like:

Asking open-ended questions instead of giving quick answers
Helping students identify their strengths and stretch points
Using feedback as a dialogue, not a verdict
Embedding reflection routines after assessments or group tasks

Over time, students begin to internalise these habits becoming more metacognitive, independent, and self-motivated. Classroom coaching doesn’t mean abandoning structure, it means using structure to empower choice, agency, and thoughtful action.

Student Peer Coaching

As coaching principles take root, students themselves can become powerful agents of growth. Schools can introduce student-led coaching or mentoring programmes that train young people to listen actively, ask purposeful questions, and support their peers without rescuing or directing.

These models can be especially valuable in academic mentoring, transition years, leadership roles, and wellbeing initiatives. When students learn to coach one another, they build empathy, resilience, and leadership skills that extend far beyond the classroom.

Importantly, peer coaching also supports inclusion. Neurodivergent students, for example, may find strength in being heard, not helped, supported to plan, reflect, and advocate on their own terms.

Coaching Beyond the Classroom

Finally, coaching cultures extend into the broader ecosystem: pastoral care, parental engagement, and whole-school decision-making. Coaching conversations can enhance boarding house routines, tutor sessions, or career guidance. Schools can also explore ways of involving families, equipping parents and carers to become thinking partners as their children navigate challenges, transitions, and choices.

This broader application fosters alignment across all touchpoints in a student’s life, building a consistent message: You are capable, resourceful, and supported.

Building a coaching culture takes time. It requires consistency, vulnerability, and commitment from leadership as well as grassroots enthusiasm. But when coaching becomes part of the fabric, not just the fringe, schools become places of dialogue, not direction. Growth, not compliance. Trust, not control. Coaching doesn’t just improve outcomes. It changes the conditions in which those outcomes become possible.