Schools Know Best: Organisational development coaching as an underdeveloped practice in schools: a research synthesis

Schools around the world have built sophisticated traditions of instructional coaching, leadership coaching, and coaching cultures, yet there is no widely understood category of practice for what happens when a coaching stance is brought to the work of developing the school as an organisation. This paper calls that absent category organisational development coaching, locates it in a four-quadrant map of the schools coaching field, and argues that the practice appears to have broad applicability across school systems, from the multi-academy trusts of the English state sector to the international school groups of Asia and the Middle East, although the commissioning routes and economic conditions under which it can take root differ significantly by context. The paper synthesises twenty years of research from organisational development, executive and team coaching, and educational leadership, building on Bushe and Marshak’s distinction between diagnostic and dialogic OD, Hawkins’s systemic team coaching tradition, Schein’s process consultation philosophy, Knight’s instructional coaching evidence base, and the most recent systematic review of coaching for school leaders (Collins et al., 2025). It triangulates this synthesis against the only published case study of dialogic OD in a school setting (Cantore and Hick, 2013), which took place in a UK state primary school in special measures, against evidence from adjacent sectors including aviation Crew Resource Management and surgical safety improvement, and against a cost analysis comparing corporate and educational pricing for organisational-level help across different school contexts. The paper makes five contributions: it names and defines a category of practice currently absent from the schools coaching literature; it explains why the absence has persisted across different school systems; it offers three composite scenarios, drawn from different national and sectoral contexts, showing what the practice could look like in schools; it presents the first published cost analysis of OD coaching at school prices, including the different commissioning routes available to fee-funded and publicly-funded schools; and it honestly addresses the contextual limits on where the practice is likely to be applicable. It concludes with eight directions for further research, intended as an invitation to practitioners and academics to build on a conversation that began in 2013 and has, until now, gone largely unanswered.