Open-source library

Free to adapt. Free to share. Built by the community.

All content, ideas, frameworks and resources developed through our forums are made freely available to the international education community. We encourage adaptation, modification and sharing of these materials to support schools and education organisations worldwide. Our open-source approach reflects our core belief that sustainable change in education emerges through community collaboration rather than proprietary solutions.

Research

Working papers and commissioned research.

Every paper here is free to read and share. We sometimes ask for your name and email so we can let you know when new research lands. It's always optional, and you only need to do it once.

Our first commissioned paper

Beyond the Quick Fix: culture, agency and sustainable change in education

Dr Kathryn Taylor EdD FCCT · April 2026 · The Bridge

Schools get stuck in cycles of short-lived initiatives that frustrate leaders and wear staff out. This paper argues the problem isn't a lack of effort, it's the gap between a school's stated culture and what staff actually experience day to day. Rather than chasing silver bullets, Dr Taylor makes the case for change that is shaped with teachers, not done to them: psychologically safe conditions, genuine collaboration, and sustained support that lets good ideas take root.

Read the paper →

Commissioned and funded by Work Collaborative, the non-profit arm of Education Leaders. Cite as: Taylor, K. (2026). Beyond the Quick Fix: culture, agency and sustainable change in education. The Bridge.

Latest working paper · No. 1

Schools Know Best

Shane Leaning · May 2026 · Work Collaborative Working Paper No. 1

Schools are full of coaching: for teaching, for leadership, for building a coaching culture. But there's almost nothing for coaching the school as an organisation, helping a whole community develop itself. This paper names that missing practice "organisational development coaching", maps where it sits in the schools coaching landscape, and pulls together twenty years of research from beyond education to show what it could look like in real school contexts, from multi-academy trusts to international school groups.

Read the paper → Download (PDF)

Free under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC BY 4.0). Cite as: Leaning, S. (2026). Schools Know Best: Organisational development coaching as an underdeveloped practice in schools: a research synthesis. Work Collaborative Working Paper No. 1. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20471564

Our mission

work collaborative exists to restore organisational confidence in educational communities by empowering them to lead sustainable change from within. Not through imposing another external model, but by helping communities recognise and amplify the expertise they already possess.

Read our full mission document →
Forum meeting notes

Open-source notes from every forum.

The work collaborative forum meets six times a year to share, learn and develop resources for our community. Read our open-source meeting notes here:

#ChangeStartsHere

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