Organisational development coaching as an underdeveloped practice in schools: a research synthesis.
Schools are full of coaching: for teaching, for leadership, for building a coaching culture. But there is no recognised practice for bringing a coaching stance to developing the school as an organisation, helping a whole community develop itself. This paper names that missing practice, calls it organisational development coaching, maps where it sits, and asks what it would take to work in real schools, from multi-academy trusts to international school groups.
Instructional, leadership and culture coaching all work at the level of the individual or the pair. None treats the school itself as the client. The corporate sector has named this for fifteen years. Schools have not.
The dominance of instructional coaching, accountability that rewards expert answers over inquiry, and an inward-looking literature all play a part, and they play out differently in each school system.
Corporate pricing would swallow up to half a school's annual development budget. Fee-funded and international groups can commission directly; publicly funded schools need trust-level, grant or sector-body routes. The paper sets out four workable models.
A single published case study from a UK state primary remains, a decade on, essentially the only example of its kind. This paper aims to revive the conversation, not close it.
None of the established schools coaching traditions treats the school itself as the client of a coaching engagement. The corporate sector has had a name for that practice for at least fifteen years. The schools sector does not.Schools Know Best, §3
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
Free under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). You are free to share and adapt this work, including commercially, with appropriate credit.
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