Levelling the landscape: Rethinking professional development through mentoring and coaching in rural and coastal schools

EMMA KERR, STRATEGIC LEAD, CORNWALL ASSOCIATION OF PRIMARY HEADS (CAPH), UK Introduction: Why place matters In rural and coastal settings such as Cornwall, professional development is not simply a route to career progression – it is fundamentally a matter of equity, teacher retention and long-term sustainability. Schools in these contexts face unique challenges: small staff teams, geographic isolation, long travel times to metropolitan training centres and constrained access to high-quality CPD (continuing professional development) and leadership development (Ovenden-Hope and Passy, 2019; Ovenden-Hope et al., 2025; NIOT, 2024). For example, the Pretty Poverty Report (Ovenden-Hope et al., 2025) highlights how conventional measures of deprivation underestimate disadvantage in remote communities, showing how transport dependency, housing precarity and professional isolation amplify inequities. Similarly, a report into educationally isolated schools found that coastal and rural scho