The Power of Coaching: Leading for Change (British Council)

Denise Barrows, UK Director, BTS Spark

At a time when the pressures on school leaders, and the complexity of the educational environments in which they operate are undoubtedly growing, policy makers and school administrators need to invest wisely in the professional development of those heading up their schools. Yet there are concerns that many leadership development programmes don’t achieve the desired impact, or get to the heart of what’s needed to meet today’s challenges. In this article we examine how one-to-one coaching can enable a tangible and sustained transformation in leaders’ day-to-day practice, providing versatile and highly impactful learning for school leaders and overcoming some of the common limitations of leadership programmes.

The leadership development challenge

The benefits of successfully building the capability of school leaders are clear. Multiple studies attest to the positive impact of effective school leadership on both student and school-level outcomes. In its 2021 report examining how principals affect students and schools, the US-based Wallace Foundation concluded, ‘It is difficult to envision an investment with a higher ceiling on its potential return than a successful effort to improve principal leadership.’¹

As education systems look to the future – post-pandemic and with significant challenges ahead – there have been a growing number of calls for a more focused approach to leadership development. This is particularly true in higher performing jurisdictions that are identifying a need for more expansive models of leadership,² and in countries where the imperative for transformation is driven by major inequalities and a lack of universal access to even basic learning.³

Despite the undoubted importance of school leadership, there remains a lack of clarity around the leadership development processes that are most impactful, as well as concerns that prevalent training models and competency frameworks for school leaders may not be sufficient to equip them with the capabilities they now need.⁴ While there may be a number of reasons for this, in many cases programme designs have failed to take into account some of the common reasons why leadership development programmes can under-deliver and fall short of the desired impact.⁵ These include:

• A one-size fits all approach, which doesn’t recognise that leadership is always contextual. Rather than focusing on the few key shifts in leadership practice to make the biggest difference for each individual leader within their own unique context, programmes can cover a whole set of expectations and capabilities, with the risk that leaders have little scope or motivation to engage deeply with any of them.
• A failure to connect the theory to the reality of people’s leadership experience, so applying the learning does not feel relevant to the real challenges and tasks that leaders must prioritise in their day-to-day leadership.
• Too much time delivering content, without engaging leaders in the hard work of personal growth and development. Often a significant knowing – doing gap remains. Leaders know what’s needed in theory, but may still struggle to break out of long-established ways of operating and shift their behaviours to achieve the greater impact they’re seeking.
• Not recognising the need (or knowing how) to shift mindsets to enable sustained shifts in behaviour. All of us hold certain unhelpful beliefs, often about ourselves and/or others. Unless we let go of these, they can continue to hold us back in our leadership. This is particularly likely when we need to become more agile and collaborative to lead in more complex and uncertain environments.

Leadership coaching unpacked

In recent years, leadership coaching has emerged as a promising tool to support the development of school leaders, and importantly, by its very nature, it overcomes all four pitfalls noted above.

While coaching has become more commonplace to support school leaders – for example in the UK’s government-funded Early Headship Coaching Offer – it is not always well-defined. And for some leaders, unless personally experienced, coaching retains an air of mystery. In reality, while there are important ethical principles, such as confidentiality, and core practices that should be common to all coaching relationships, coaching is a versatile process that can help school leaders in myriad ways.

For one head teacher, one-to-one coaching offers, ‘… a safe space to offload, clarify my thought processes and become reacquainted with my love of education.’ For another, her coach, ‘… empowered me to go ahead and make some tough decisions and arrange meetings to hold those tricky conversations I was avoiding’. A third describes how, ‘The depth of reflection, enabled by my coach, was immense. She opened up some deep-rooted areas of my leadership journey that to date I had not fully explored – it’s been powerful.’

These experiences reflect some of the following benefits of high-quality leadership coaching:

1. It offers a powerful way for leaders to build important leadership capabilities, whether as a short, focused process to tackle a specific problem or development need, or a longer-term arrangement that supports leaders in navigating the challenges of leadership as they arise.
2. It creates a valuable, safe and supportive space for leaders to do the deep and sometimes uncomfortable work of personal reflection and transformational growth, uncovering the beliefs and assumptions that may need to shift to unlock hitherto unrealised potential.
3. For many leaders, their coaching conversations may be the only time they feel able to give proper attention to building and maintaining their own well-being and personal resourcefulness.
4. A trusted coach can become a much-needed sounding board and critical friend for school leaders, helping them explore different perspectives, analyse potential outcomes, and develop their critical thinking skills. This leads to better decision-making processes and greater confidence in leadership decisions.
5. Similarly, a coaching relationship can become a forward-thinking space for more strategic or innovative thinking, with leaders supported to explore creative solutions and new possibilities for the future of their schools.

What makes coaching so powerful?

There are a number of coaching characteristics which engender a powerful learning experience, but also make it an especially valuable professional development process for school leaders:

1. One-to-one leadership coaching is personalised, with every coaching conversation focused on the individual leader and the particular goals they have set, the identified development needs, or the challenges they need to tackle. The leader’s specific leadership context will be kept expressly in mind, thus ensuring the learning process feels meaningful and relevant.
   
   A coaching programme may offer the option to include a psychometric test or leadership diagnostic; a self-assessment, or a 180 or 360 review inviting others to share their assessments of particular leadership attributes or behaviours. With the support of a coach to help interpret and contextualise the results, such an exercise can prove invaluable in providing useful insights into how others perceive an individual’s leadership, and the particular strengths and development needs they observe.
   
   A coaching programme may offer the option to include a psychometric test or leadership diagnostic; a self-assessment, or a 180 or 360 review inviting others to share their assessments of particular leadership attributes or behaviours. With the support of a coach to help interpret and contextualise the results, such an exercise can prove invaluable in providing useful insights into how others perceive an individual’s leadership, and the particular strengths and development needs they observe.
   
   The confidential nature of coaching is hugely valuable for school leaders, providing what they perceive as the only truly safe space to acknowledge the full reality of leadership – the pressures, the uncertainties and doubts all leaders feel at times – and to benefit from non-judgemental, expert support to identify and implement strategies for managing and overcoming these.
2. Leadership coaching is highly purposeful. It’s not a soft option, it’s a process designed to facilitate the hard work of personal and professional growth. In a coaching relationship, there are no spectators! A skilled coach will facilitate a process of change which gets to the heart of the matter – the mindsets and beliefs that underpin patterns of behaviour – and elicits a shift in these to sustain new approaches.
   
   Experienced coaches are able to open up new levels of personal growth and learning for leaders, empowering vertical development in contrast to more typical horizontal development. To use a technology metaphor: horizontal development equates to adding more apps to our phone; vertical development is about upgrading the operating system to support more complex tasks. It enables leaders to view from a different perspective, find new and creative solutions, act with greater wisdom and capacity, and have transformative impact, both within and beyond their own school or organisation.
3. Coaching is a highly practical professional development option for busy, time-poor school leaders with tight professional development budgets. Leaders may be reluctant to take time away from school to attend scheduled training events or enrol in a programme that isn’t entirely relevant to their current challenges and priorities. Conversely, coaching offers a ‘just for me, just enough, just in time’ solution that maximises the value of every minute. With most coaching sessions delivered remotely, sessions can be scheduled flexibly when a school leader needs them. Leaders discuss issues with their coach as they arise and agree a new way forward. Leaders can then immediately apply these new strategies, reviewing progress and refining plans almost in real time with their coach.

Whether you’re a school leader recognising that your own professional development and support should be a priority, or an administrator, system leader or policy maker needing to shift leadership mindsets and build new capabilities at scale, leadership coaching should be part of your arsenal. Having coached thousands of school leaders around the world, at BTS Spark we are continually inspired and encouraged by testimonials like this one: ‘I’ve had a lot of professional development in the past, but coaching has been like the missing piece in the puzzle for me. My coach helped me to work out how to support teachers and empower them. It has fundamentally changed the way I work and lead.’

Reference:

¹ Grissom, J., Egalite, A. and Lindsay, C. (2021) How Principals Affect Students and Schools: A Systematic Synthesis of Two Decades of Research. New York: The Wallace Foundation.

² See for example, OECD (2023). High Performing Systems for Tomorrow 2023 Conceptual Framework, and Hallgarten, J. and Robinson, L. (2023) What else? What next? What if? A Report by Big Education and CfEY into the future of leadership development in England. London: Big Education.

³ See for example, World Bank (2023). Realizing the Future of Learning – From learning poverty to learning for everyone, everywhere Washington DC: World Bank Group, and Alfadala, A. and Cosner, C. (2023). Post-pandemic National Educational Investments: School Leadership Development through Innovative Learning Designs. WISE/Qatar Foundation.

⁴ See for example, in the UK context, Hallgarten, J. and Robinson, L. (2023). What else? What next? What if? A Report by Big Education and CfEY into the future of leadership development in England. London: Big Education, and Cruddas, L. (2023). The New Domains of Educational Leadership. Nottingham: Confederation of School Trusts.

⁵ Gurdjian, P., Halbeisen, T. and Lane, K. (2014). Why leadership-development programs fail. McKinsey Quarterly, January 2014 edition.

First published in Douglas, S. (2025). Leading for change: School leadership standards and practices in a global context. British Council (available at https://www.britishcouncil.org/research-insight/school-leadership)