Educational psychologists teacher coaching children listening

Psychologists Coach Teachers, We Should Ask What That Tells Us

February 28, 2025•2 min read

The fact that we now need specialists to teach professionals how to listen to children is, itself, the evidence that something has gone seriously wrong.

Psychologists Coach Teachers, We Should Ask What That Tells Us

Educational psychologists were not originally deployed in schools to support teacher wellbeing. Their remit was children: assessment, diagnosis, intervention, the navigation of SEND processes. That is still the formal expectation and the primary function.

But something has shifted. EPs and school mental health professionals are increasingly being called on to provide emotional coaching to teachers: helping them manage their responses to challenging pupils, supporting their emotional regulation, helping them set professional boundaries, and developing strategies for navigating the anxiety produced by inspection, management pressure, and the relentless demands of a role that has expanded far beyond its original scope.

This is worth pausing on. Not because the support is unwelcome, it is clearly needed, and the evidence on teacher wellbeing makes that plain. But because the question of why it is needed, and what its systematic provision reveals, has not been asked clearly enough. If a significant proportion of teachers require emotional coaching simply to function sustainably in their professional role, the question is not what is wrong with the teachers. The question is what the environment is doing to them.

We have already asked and answered this question for children. When children in large numbers require intervention to manage their distress, we increasingly understand that the environment is a factor in producing that distress, and that interventions applied to individuals without changing the environment will produce limited lasting benefit. The same logic applies here. The teacher who is emotionally overwhelmed, whose professional confidence has been eroded, who is managing chronic stress while being asked to emotionally regulate thirty children at once, is not primarily a coaching problem. They are an environment problem.

The schools that produce confident, engaged children reliably also produce supported, professionally respected teachers. That is not a coincidence. It is the same mechanism operating at two levels of the same system. When we change the environment for teachers, we change what is possible for children. The two are not separate questions. And any approach to school improvement that addresses one without the other is only doing half the work.

Kate

Kate Markland is a former award-winning physiotherapist with twenty years of clinical experience, the founder of StoryQuest Global, and the co-author of the international bestselling Adventures of Gabriel children's book series. She developed the StoryQuest methodology from clinical listening principles built across two decades of practice. Taken into schools across the UK, it achieved 100% engagement across 465 children in nine schools with zero behavioural incidents, including children with SEND, EAL learners, and reluctant writers. The research was conducted using Classic Grounded Theory across 318 children, identifying seven self-leadership transformations. It has been presented to the British Psychological Society, accepted by UK Parliament, and submitted to UNICEF. The methodology was built during the hardest period of Kate's life. One hour a week on FaceTime with her son. No desk. No classroom. No permission. What came out of that constraint became an Amazon number one bestseller, a validated research framework, and a movement now reaching schools and families across the UK, India, Pakistan, Canada, the United States, Nigeria, and Australia. Kate has been featured on BBC News, Times Radio, and in international publications across multiple countries. She has submitted evidence to the Justice Committee, the Independent Review of Social Work Regulation, and the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee. She was awarded the PhysioTimes Women in Leadership Award. She was told she was the danger. She built the proof that she was the answer.

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