The Compass

_{This post is a lightly edited transcript of my presentation at ResearchED Bournemouth on Saturday 7 June. In it, I explore how we can grow leadership capacity in schools, not through roles or titles, but through the everyday conversations and habits that shape culture of a school. The talk draws on coaching principles, research evidence, and practical experience to offer a more human, sustainable vision of school leadership.}

I’ve worked in and with a number of schools now, and there’s a pattern I’ve seen more than once. It starts when leadership stops listening.

At first, it’s subtle: line management becomes checklist-driven, staff voice is limited to a yearly staff survey with opaque outcomes, and decisions start arriving fully formed. Over time, people stop speaking up, not because they don’t care, but because they don’t feel it will make a difference. They have lost agency at this stage.

You see, leadership isn’t only about making decisions. It’s about creating the conditions where others can, where people feel seen, heard, and able to apply agency from wherever they stand. That is what I mean by developing leadership capacity.

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a session with Professor Haili Hughes on instructional coaching at the Bryanston Education Summit. Hughes struck an illuminating balance between scholarship and grounded wisdom, reminding us that coaching, when done well, is not just another professional development fad, but a powerful, evidence-informed lever for meaningful change in schools.

Her session echoed the work of Jim Knight, the American educationalist who frames coaching as a deeply respectful, collaborative act. Knight resists hierarchical metaphors of ‘fixing’ teachers and instead promotes coaching as a dialogue rooted in equality, choice, and mutual learning. In this sense, coaching is not a programme to be implemented but a mindset to be adopted.

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We’ve all experienced how when we walk past certain classrooms something immediately feels different. There’s no raised voices, no attention-seeking antics, just a calm, purposeful energy and direction. Students lean in, not opt out, and learning is a habit, not a chore. And it all feels as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

We often attribute this to charisma or being a natural , as if the skills required to run a classroom well were somehow innate and therefore unattainable to the rest of us. But this does a disservice both to the craft of teaching and to the science that can help explain it. What looks like instinct is often just insight applied deliberately and consistently.

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Thinking is the Work

In an age where information is instantaneous and answers are automated, the question is no longer whether pupils can find knowledge, but what they do with it once they have it.

As AI tools increasingly offer the illusion of thinking without the effort, we must remain vigilant against the creeping erosion of human cognitive work. Cognitive offloading, a helpful strategy for freeing up mental bandwidth, can, when overused or uncritical, become a kind of intellectual leasehold. Students access knowledge only temporarily and superficially. Without the effort of generative thinking (retrieving, connecting, questioning…) they never truly come to own it. Knowledge remains the asset of others, and they remain the tenants, rather than the landlords of understanding.

The classroom, then, must remain a place where thinking is not outsourced, but exercised. A space where knowledge is not merely acquired but applied, questioned, and woven into webs of meaning. This resource explores how teachers can structure learning so that pupils think more, not less. It champions thinking that produces, secures, explores, and connects; that builds both understanding and the mental architecture to retain it.

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