Over the past four years, a primary school in Melbourne has been teaching its students to coach.

Rockbank Primary School didn’t start there. Acting Principal Chris Daxecker and teacher Nicholas Randich describe how they first spent years building a coaching culture with their staff. Only once that foundation was strong did they turn to their students, working with GCI’s Coaching Skills for Students program. In the latest GCI podcast, four of those students join the conversation and talk about what becoming a student coach has meant to them.

Listen to Episode Here

It’s a story I keep coming back to, because it raises two key questions many schools are now asking:

• What becomes possible when coaching isn’t only something teachers do?
• In this era of AI, how can we support our students’ communication and leadership skills?

From staffroom to student community

Many schools already coach their staff well. They’ve seen what better conversations do for teaching, leadership and culture. The next step is bringing that same quality of conversation to students: with each other, with younger students and with the adults around them.

The aim isn’t to turn students into mini-professionals. It’s to give them the skills that sit underneath everything else we need as learners, leaders, team members, and thoughtful citizens: listening well, asking good questions, setting meaningful goals and supporting one another. Schools tell us this shows up in student voice, leadership, wellbeing and the relationships that shape a school’s culture and community.

This is also the thinking behind Schools That Coach, the new book by Professor Christian van Nieuwerburgh, Dr Jim Knight, and John Campbell, which explores what happens when coaching is woven through the whole life of a school.

“Coaching is at its most powerful when it becomes part of the culture of a school, not just an ‘add-on'. When students learn to listen well, ask good questions and support one another, they gain skills that serve them well beyond school. What I love about this cohort is that it is based on the concept of co-design--every school will shape it around what matters most in its own community.” - Professor Christian van Nieuwerburgh

10 Schools That Coach

In 2027, we’re working with a cohort of just 10 schools to do this with intention.

The cohort is deliberately small, so every school has real access to the people behind the work and can learn from the others along the way. Each school chooses the form that fits. Your focus might be student leadership, a peer coaching program, pastoral care and wellbeing, or tutoring. The form and context may vary, but the coaching and conversational skills, frameworks and tools to support are the same.

Every school follows the same pathway, timed to suit its calendar:

• Coaching Skills for Students: a full-day interactive workshop at your school, with your students and the staff leading your program.
• Becoming a Student Coach: a half-day follow-up that extends the skills and prepares students to coach their peers, including clear boundaries and knowing when to connect a peer with a trusted adult.
• Two live cohort webinars during the year with Christian and me providing the staff leading the programs with opportunities to ask questions and learn alongside us and those in the cohort.
• A 45-minute implementation call for your team, a month or two after the workshops, to support you in the “doing” in your unique community, and help with your implementation in 2028.

The staff leading the program attend both workshops alongside students, so they leave with the language, structure and resources to keep the work safe, high quality and growing.

Schools across Australia have already begun confirming their places. What unites them isn’t a particular size or sector, but a belief that students can do more than we often ask of them.

Excitingly, due to demand from schools and leaders across Europe and the UK, we are excited to say we’re opening up 10 Schools That Coach in Europe and the UK, too.

If making a life-long impact on students' communication or leadership is something your school believes in, we’d love to hear from you.

We’re looking forward to how their different contexts shape what we all learn together.

Be one of 10

Join our 2027 cohort of 10 Schools That Coach in Australia or Europe & the UK

For innovative schools ready to teach students to have better quality coaching conversations, whether through student leadership, peer coaching, wellbeing or tutoring.

Includes: both workshops at your school, all facilitation and digital resources, two live cohort webinars with Professor Christian van Nieuwerburgh, Dan Steele, and Richard Reid, and a 45-minute implementation call for your team.

How places work: places are confirmed in the order signed proposals are received. Once all 10 are filled, schools are offered a place on a waitlist.

Australia: Dan Steele, dsteele@growthcoaching.com.au
UK, Ireland and Europe: Richard Reid, rreid@growthcoachinguk.com