It's Your Time You're Wasting: Coaching or ker-CHING?

This week’s episode of It’s Your Time You’re Wasting with me and Martin Robinson is on instructional coaching.

And here is the podcast→

If you’d rather read a written version, carry on…

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Why instructional coaching might just be the next overhyped fad in education – or the best thing we never quite get right.

For something that’s supposed to help teachers, coaching seems to cause an awful lot of confusion. (It might even be another Rorschach blot!) Is it a personalised tool for growth, or a compliance mechanism in disguise? Is it transformative, or just another well-intentioned idea destined to sink under the weight of bureaucracy and bollocks?

The word coach originally referred to a carriage; something that carried you from one place to another. By the 1830s, Oxford University students were using it to refer to tutors who could ‘carry’ them through their exams. The metaphor stuck. In sport, the coach became someone who prepared you to win. In business, a guru who helped you think differently. And in education? Well, that’s where things get fuzzy.

The philosophical antecedents are impeccable and go back, as all the best things seem to, to ancient Greece. Socrates, for instance, believed in the power of dialogue, not direction. Famously, he claimed to '“know nothing,” and his approach (the Socratic method) was to ask questions that made students think for themselves, to unearth ideas rather than impose them. It’s not a stretch to see how that spirit lives on in coaching, especially in its more reflective, collaborative forms. The idea is to empower teachers, not evaluate them. To draw out insight, not deliver directives.

But noble intentions rarely survive contact with spreadsheets, inspection frameworks, and those slick PDF templates favoured by coaching consultants.

In sport, coaching is simple. You’re training to win. Feedback is immediate, results are measurable, and success is unambiguous. You either score the goal or you don’t. In business, coaching is less about performance and more about potential: all mindset shifts and strategic positioning, the kind of intangible outcomes that make it hard to say what’s actually changed. In schools, coaching tries to do both. We want measurable impact, but we’re dealing with complex human dynamics in highly contextual settings. Results are hard to isolate, and improvement - if it comes at all - is usually slow and difficult to attribute.

Still, coaching is having its moment, and it’s easy to see why. It promises personalisation, evidence-based feedback, and the kind of professional growth that isn’t tethered to the whims of a training day PowerPoint. Done well, it adapts to different subjects, experience levels, and school contexts. It’s being sold as a way to reduce burnout, retain good teachers, and inject a bit of humanity back into CPD. There’s even some evidence to support the hype.

A 2018 meta-analysis by Matthew Kraft, David Blazar and Dylan Hogan reviewed 60 studies and found that instructional coaching can have a moderate positive impact on teaching quality and student outcomes. Coaching improved instructional practice by nearly half a standard deviation and pupil attainment by just under 0.2. Promising, yes, but with a caveat. When scaled up, those effects tend to shrink. Why? Because coaching’s success depends heavily on context, on how it’s delivered, and crucially, on whether trust exists between coach and teacher.

This is where Sam Sims’ work adds important nuance. Sims argues that instructional coaching stands out because it has consistently shown positive effects on pupil outcomes in replicated randomised controlled trials, such as the My Teaching Partner programme. Its design mirrors established cognitive science principles - particularly deliberate practice and the novice-to-expert model - making it both theoretically sound and practically grounded. Moreover, coaching has demonstrated reliable success across subjects, phases, and contexts, highlighting its adaptability. Crucially, it follows clear, structured protocols that enable consistent implementation.

However, Sims cautions that coaching only works when it supports teacher agency and is part of a broader, integrated professional development strategy. If misapplied as a top-down fix, it risks becoming performative rather than transformative. Rob Coe goes further. He’s sceptical of the entire model. There isn’t, he points out, enough robust evidence to suggest coaching is the magic bullet it’s sometimes made out to be. Implementation varies wildly, and the quality of coaching - as with any intervention - depends on who’s doing it, how well they’re trained, and how much time and resource are available. Coe’s worry is that coaching is being oversold, used to justify cutting back on other forms of CPD, or to mask deeper problems in school culture.

The most popular models tell their own story. Doug Lemov’s approach - most famously captured by Bambrick-Santoyo’s data-driven, feedback-heavy systems - offers structure and clarity, but can also feel overly managerial. Jim Knight’s model, on the other hand, is relational and reflective. It’s grounded in partnership and mutual trust, but without a clear framework, it can veer into vagueness. One may be too tight; the other too loose. As a generalised principle, where prescription is too loose we get lethal mutation, where’s it’s too tight we risk perverse incentives.

And then there’s the money. Coaching has become an industry. Schools are spending tens of thousands on coaching programmes. External consultants are peddling packages and frameworks, often with little contextual understanding of what a given school actually needs. Adverts are popping up offering £70,000+ coaching roles, a staggering sum when many schools can’t afford enough full-time staff. So we have to ask: is this really the best use of our already-stretched resources? What’s the opportunity cost? What are we not doing because we’re investing in coaching?

Then there’s the question of curriculum. Does coaching help teachers get better at teaching their subject, or does it focus too much on generic pedagogy? If it’s all about ‘how’ and not enough about ‘what’, does it risk becoming a distraction from what really matters?

When coaching works, it works because it builds trust, creates space for reflection, and helps teachers align their practice with their values and goals. When it fails, it becomes yet another tick-box exercise, another thing to survive. The worst coaching relationships are performative, compliance-driven, and unmoored from classroom realities. In these cases, it doesn’t empower teachers, it watches them more closely.

Perhaps it works best with novice teachers, who have the most to gain from regular feedback and structured support. But even then, there are diminishing returns. At what point does coaching become an expensive way to tell experienced teachers what they already know?

So what does good coaching actually look like? It’s relational, not transactional. It’s grounded in curriculum, not just technique. It sets clear goals but allows space for agency. It’s focused, consistent, and above all, non-prescriptive. And ideally, it leads teachers to coach themselves, to reflect, adapt, and improve without needing someone else to hold the clipboard. If we’re not aiming for that, then what - you might ask - are we doing?

Coaching is, at its best, a beautiful idea. But in the wrong hands - or under the wrong pressures - it risks becoming just another education fad. The sort that promises transformation, delivers templates, and quietly becomes another cost centre. As ever, it all comes down to the same question: is this something we’re doing with teachers, or to them?

Because if we get it wrong, it’s not coaching. It’s just another carriage heading nowhere, pulled along by jargon and powered by hope.