ANDREA BEAN, RESEARCH AND EVALUATION MANAGER, TEACHER DEVELOPMENT TRUST, UK
NAZYA GHALIB, CO-DIRECTOR AND SENIOR CONSULTANT, OUR EDGE EDUCATION, UK
KRUPA PATEL, CO-DIRECTOR, OUR EDGE EDUCATION AND INNOVATE EDUCATION, UK
HANNAH TYREMAN, PROFESSIONAL LEARNING LEAD, TEACHER DEVELOPMENT TRUST, UK
Professional development is an investment and a catalyst for transformation. When done well, it reshapes beliefs, deepens knowledge, strengthens practice and supports wellbeing, driving better outcomes for students (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017). To realise these impacts, there must be a coherent sequence of interactions that support staff to transferThe processes of applying learning to new situations learning into practice (Whitworth and Chiu, 2015).
Coaching is one form of sustained professional development that can support this learning transfer, as well as influence career progression and retention (Devine and Meyers, 2013; Kraft et al., 2018). While coaching takes many forms, all models thrive where there is strong psychological and identity safety, reciprocal trust and a genuine commitment to equity (Bean, 2025).
In such conditions, according to Devine and Meyers (2013) and Kraft et al. (2018), coaching has the capacity to:
- build collective hope, agency, motivation and purpose among staff
- nurture colleagues’ curiosity and empathy through exposure to differing perspectives
- ensure that staff feel fully valued, heard and seen
- build staff’s self-efficacy and psychological resilience, reducing stress and improving wellbeing
- encourage the disruption of dominant habits and beliefs in a setting’s systems and practices.
Beyond traditional coaching
To ensure that these benefits are realised equitably, coaching must address the whole person, including their cultural identity (Orange et al., 2019). Otherwise, it risks overlooking systemic inequities, limiting impact (Hewson, 2025a).
In this article, we use ‘global majority’ to refer to individuals who are ‘Black, Asian, Brown, dual-heritage, indigenous to the global south, and or have been racialised as “ethnic minorities”’ (Campbell-Stephens, 2020, p. 1). Kotonya and colleagues (2025) highlight that effective coaching is particularly significant for global majority educators, whose leaving rates remain higher than their white counterparts: 12.4 per cent for Black teachers, 11.8 per cent for those of mixed ethnicity, 11 per cent for Asian teachers and nine per cent for white teachers. Almost twice as many Black teachers as white cite a lack of senior support, and despite equal levels of ambition, global majority educators are promoted less often. Equalising these rates would retain 1,000 more teachers each year, also ensuring more visible role models (Kotonya et al., 2025).
Targeted, equity-literate coaching that validates lived experiences and challenges racial biases may be a ‘critical enabler’ for global majority educators to thrive, stay and progress in the profession (Kotonya et al., 2025).
Coaching fails to be inclusive
Coaching is considered an inherently ‘good’ form of professional development that benefits everyone (Kraft et al., 2018; Okoya, 2025). Yet that fails to be the reality for many marginalised educators.
Racial consciousness
Global majority educators experience white coaches with limited racial consciousness, who rarely understand or acknowledge their lived realities (Orange et al., 2019). The likelihood of a coachee feeling that their coach shares their life experiences is low, given the small number of global majority coaches in the profession and the smaller platform for their services in comparison to their white counterparts (Roche and Passmore, 2023).
Coaching training does not adequately equip coaches to uphold principles of equity, including challenging oppressive practices and prevalent assumptions around race, power, positionalityPositionality refers to what we know and believe. It relates to our understanding of ourselves, of who we are and what we bring to our research. For example, when a researcher describes their ‘position’ in relation to their study they may discuss their (possibly conflicting) roles as colleague, researcher, teacher and parent. It is linked to reflexivity. and privilege. Coaching models do not equip coaches to have validating dialogues about experiences of racism, and supervision is rarely available to support coaches with navigating such accounts (Hewson, 2025a, 2025b).
Unique identities
Coaching prioritises goal-based actions that limit opportunities for identity-based dialogue and work, which can be exclusionary for global majority educators, as their context, motivations and values deeply affect their work.
One manifestation is feeling an acute responsibility, compared to white colleagues, for how settings fail to meet the needs of global majority staff and students, especially when curriculum, resources, policies and pedagogies are not anti-racist (Miller and Lashley, 2022).
Coaching frequently responds to these narratives with neutrality and loose acknowledgement of lived experiences (Hewson, 2025b). Met with this detachment, global majority coachees may feel unable to be authentic, instead diluting their identities and assimilating into a setting’s dominant cultures (Okoya, 2025; Roche and Passmore, 2023).
Power and privilege
Those in more senior roles with dominant identities experience greater power and privilege. This often leads to better access to sustained coaching and an increased likelihood of being coaches within peer models. This hierarchy creates access barriers to coaching, particularly for individuals with intersectional identities, who experience a double burden (Okoya, 2025).
Individualistic, not systemic
Even when global majority educators’ individual goals are acknowledged, the racism and exclusionary working cultures that they experience are often met by silence (Hewson, 2025b). This creates a dynamic that focuses on the coachee’s own mindset and actions, disregarding the systemic barriers that they encounter, further compounding fatigue from fighting an oppressive system and contributing to a deepening of the profession’s attrition challenges.
Coachee experiences
The BAMEed Network trains global majority coaches to work pro bono with global majority educators, who have often experienced coaching that didn’t adequately honour their identities and needs.
One coachee from a South Asian background had been an associate senior leader for a year and received coaching from two senior leaders. Despite being a competent and ambitious individual, they struggled with a persistent sense of being an outsider within a predominantly white leadership team. The school culture subtly implied that they should feel grateful for their role and that requesting more might be seen as overstepping. This reinforced internalised beliefs, deepening their self-doubt and leaving them hesitant to pursue a permanent leadership position.
Another coachee, a dual-heritage female middle leader, received coaching from her line manager. Her experiences of micro-aggressions from staff and students were dismissed as ‘overly sensitive’, with one specific instance met by excuses for the student’s behaviour and advice to ‘ignore it’. This leader felt further unsupported by performative policies, which were contradicted by human resources’ deployment of non-disclosure agreements and silencing tactics.
When racial consciousness is absent in coaching, there isn’t the safety for global majority educators to show up authentically, and coaching compounds the inequities that it claims to challenge (Roche and Passmore, 2023).
Coaching possibilities
If redesigned around three principles, coaching holds more constructive possibilities for global majority educators.
1. Identity-responsive
Identity-responsive coaching engages with coachees’ identities, lived experiences and systemic barriers. As global majority educators often carry additional workload from racism and bias (Tereshchenko et al., 2020), high-quality coaching should place identity work at its core, reflecting individual perspectives and realities.
This approach requires coaches to develop deep listening skills, validate lived experiences and foster confidence and agency, rather than deepen internalised bias (Okoya, 2025; Gyimah et al., 2022). Identity-responsive coaching is a space of curiosity and psychological safety, where conversations about history and beliefs happen and educators feel seen and heard.
One of two global majority colleagues in a school, a primary phase leader with over 10 years’ experience, feared challenging leadership decisions. The coach and coachee discussed lived experiences together. Uninterrupted time provided space in which to explore beliefs of being underrepresented and stereotyped, and to process frustration. Without the pressure to justify feelings, the coachee left knowing that their story matters.
2. Structured support for career progression
Global majority leaders often face additional career challenges, including imposter syndrome, lack of sponsorship and underrepresentation (Kotonya et al., 2025; Roche and Passmore, 2023). When coaching is aligned with promotion pathways, coachees are better equipped to navigate these challenges, with significant benefits for Black women, in particular (Okoya, 2025). Embedding high-quality coaching into leadership development programmes can ensure that coachees’ ambitions translate to genuine career advancement.
While increasing the number of global majority coaches nationally would strengthen representation, it’s important for all coaches to develop their racial consciousness. This requires training that shifts from tokenistic cultural references towards the development of deep racial literacy, enabling coaches to use approaches confidently and responsively (Roche and Passmore, 2023). Coaching frameworks that combine cultural insight with professional flexibility meet educators where they are, rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all model.
3. Aligning coaching with culture and systems
Focusing solely on individual professional growth risks leaving structural barriers untouched. When coaching recognises the role of organisational culture, it can raise racial literacy, improve psychological safety and challenge systemic inequities in a setting’s policies and practices (Miller, 2019).
Coaches applying an equity lens influence their work not only with global majority coachees but with white educators too, fostering accountability for change, especially where there is system-level support and supervision for such work (Kotonya et al., 2025).
One white headteacher, coached by a global majority colleague, was challenged on their ‘colour-blind’ approach to staff development after declaring, ‘I don’t see colour.’ Coaching surfaced unconscious biases in various practices, including recruitment and feedback. Through reflective dialogue and accountability, a review of appraisal language and the introduction of equity-focused leadership training were introduced. Coaching moved beyond personal growth; it reshaped school systems, embedding inclusive practices and shifting the culture from passive diversityThe recognition of individual differences in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, physical ability, religious beliefs and other differences to active equity.
Practical applications for coaching
For coaching to become safe and effective for global majority teachers and leaders, several actions are required.
Coaching models
Enduring Western coaching models and their associated practices, which primarily prioritise the individual over the collective and goals over identities, must be replaced by racially conscious ones. Such decolonised models could equip coaches to engage in validating dialogue about experiences of racism and offer approaches for challenging systemic barriers in education.
Coach training and supervision
Training must robustly focus on building coaches’ capacity to acknowledge the lived experiences of global majority educators, engage in radical listening, honour communication preferences and create a safe developmental space. This training would introduce inclusive models and practices and build racial literacy and consciousness, to challenge oppressive power systems in education. One such existing offer includes Hewson’s Raising Racial Consciousness work (2025c).
Coach supervision would accompany such training, supporting individual coaches to continue applying their learning and emotionally navigate this work.
Leadership commitment
At an organisational level, leaders must interrogate the equity of access and experience of coaching in their settings. Questions to ignite insights and action include:
- Who has and does not have access to high-quality coaching?
- What identities do our coaches have? How might this influence their work?
- For whom is coaching working well and not so well? How do we know?
- How are we preparing our coaches to work with coachees in ways that acknowledge their lived realities?
- How are we supporting coaches’ and leaders’ continued growth by creating spaces that encourage respectful dialogue and nurture curiosity?
Beyond the specific lens of coaching, leaders must confront other barriers to inclusionAn approach where a school aims to ensure that all children are educated together, with support for those who require it to access the full curriculum and contribute to and participate in all aspects of school life in their settings, actively addressing how systemic inequities shape staff experiences. This could include investing in racial literacy training for wider staff, ensuring that career progression activities support global majority colleagues to flourish, revising policies and procedures to prevent bias and responding robustly to racist incidents.
Beyond aspiration
Ensuring that coaching is safe and effective for everyone means moving beyond a theoretical aspiration. Establishing a new baseline and actions that enable equity of access and fulfilling experiences will only be possible with a radical, ongoing commitment from all those involved in education.
