Coaching IS leadership in multi-school groups
School leaders’ lives are complex and increasingly difficult. Pressing operational issues clamour for their attention and they struggle (practically and morally) to carve out the time to stand back, review and think. Some development programmes provide that opportunity but at a high cost (in time and sometimes money). What they want is opportunities to sort the signal from the noise which don’t make the time management problem bigger. Leaders in Opportunity Areas have the additional burden of coping with all the ‘support’ being thrown at them at once. In Blackpool, we have been working with others to help leaders sort the wheat from the chaff by equipping them with evidence-informed strategies for working out which initiative really does the job they need done.
In Ipswich, we are providing coaching support to achieve the same thing. And you don’t have to be in a challenge area to find this useful. in the Community Academy Trust, we are helping school leaders develop the skills to coach each other (in Ipswich we are providing ‘expert’ coaches). This is a trend we are seeing more widely; leaders in multi-school systems want to maintain a sense of coherence and adherence to the values - realising the trust's mission - without falling into the 'command and control' trap that the accountability structures set for you. MAT leaders are realising that the way to achieve this is to establish a coaching relationship with your school leaders and, better still, establish co-coaching relationships between those leaders. Not only does this promote a healthy, collaborative leadership culture, it helps manage the workload (which often, otherwise, involves loads of meetings)
There’s no mystery to coaching (though some models can feel like being inducted into a cult!) but nor is it a skill you just *acquire* with your PGCE. It’s also a slow burn – CUREE produced a National Framework for Mentoring and Coaching in England a decade ago (and then one for Wales) and we’ve been extolling its virtues tirelessly ever since and developing practical resources to support schools implement it. You can find some of them on our website - starting here
Paul Crisp
Managing Director