Building Coaching Cultures in Schools: Lessons from Sport and Business

In high-performance sport and elite business environments, coaching isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. It sharpens focus, aligns teams around shared goals, and nurtures psychological safety to enable bold thinking and brave action. Increasingly, schools are recognising that these same conditions are essential for effective teaching, learning, and leadership. So what happens when we borrow from the best - adopting coaching models honed on the track, in the boardroom, and on the pitch - and bring them into the corridors of education?

Why Coaching Belongs in Schools

Education has long prioritised individual development, of students, of teachers, of support staff, but less attention has been given to collective development: how teams grow together. Coaching in schools is often limited to individual mentoring or performance management. But in sport and business, coaching is leveraged systemically: leaders are coached, teams are coached, and whole cultures are shaped by a coaching mindset.

When we shift our lens from “coaching as intervention” to “coaching as infrastructure,” schools begin to transform. Trust deepens. Conversations shift from compliance to curiosity. Leaders stop directing and start designing environments that nurture autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Lessons from Sport: The Power of the Team

In elite sport, the coaching dynamic is not one-way. Athletes are coached and contribute actively to shaping team performance. They reflect, give peer feedback, and engage in tactical decision-making. The goal isn’t just to comply with instruction, it’s to think like a coach.

Translating this into education means:

• Creating reflective spaces where staff teams regularly debrief and co-analyse performance.

• Using video review (common in sport) to unpack teaching practice, leadership moments, or team dynamics.

• Encouraging role fluidity - seeing everyone as both learner and leader.

Just as in sport, school teams flourish when individuals feel seen, heard, and valued for their contributions—not just their outcomes.

Lessons from Business: Coaching as Culture

The most successful organisations don’t bolt coaching on, they bake it in. In these settings:

• Feedback is normalised, not pathologised.

• Coaching conversations happen in corridors, not just formal review meetings.

• Leaders ask more than they tell.

Models such as Systemic Team Coaching (Hawkins, 2011) and Collective Leadership (West et al., 2014) offer powerful blueprints. These approaches emphasise:

• Aligning purpose across the team

• Building trust and dialogue

• Holding each other accountable for collective goals

In schools, this could mean rethinking SLT meetings from operational updates to strategic coaching huddles. It might involve middle leaders engaging in structured peer coaching, or staff voice driving change through reflective inquiry circles.

From Compliance to Co-Creation

At its heart, a coaching culture in schools isn’t about adopting new tools—it’s about shifting the relational DNA of the organisation. It’s about moving from:

• Evaluation to exploration

• Top-down directives to shared meaning-making

• Individual heroics to team coherence

This doesn’t mean abandoning structure. Like a well-trained sports team or business unit, coaching cultures are held together by clear agreements, trust, and shared intent. But they’re also agile, adaptive, and deeply human.

Final Thoughts

The future of school leadership will not be driven by the lone heroic headteacher, but by connected, reflective, high-trust teams. As educators, we have much to learn from the disciplines of sport and business, not just in strategy, but in how we treat one another, how we grow together, and how we pursue excellence with and for our teams.

Coaching cultures aren't a trend. They're a paradigm shift. And schools that embrace this shift may just find themselves not only improving performance but becoming places where staff and students alike truly thrive.